The Rabbi of Lud

seven

BECAUSE she’s as single-minded as I am. Single-minded on my behalf, taking an even more single-minded view of things than I did. Not figuring the kibbutz into the equation, not figuring Ridgewood or Israel or the Law of the Return or any other loophole. Too single-minded for that, her single-minded eyes focused on one single-minded principle — Rabbi of Lud or nothing. More single-minded. (Because with me there was never any question of stealth, but then — give the devil her due — she wasn’t her father but only the helpless kid in the affair, so maybe she felt she had to. Well, of course she felt she had to, obviously she felt she had to, though — though this is the father in me talking — it was a perfectly reasonable, perfectly honorable stealth, like that famous letter hidden right in front of your eyes in the story — a sort of purloined stealth. Getting Shelley to drive her to all those libraries that spring and winter and even, when she was over the limit herself, to check out extra books for her on her card. And we worried because no matter how much work she did it didn’t seem to get reflected in her grades. To say nothing of the three or four hundred dollars she was able to put away by never volunteering to return the change we had coming to us, or by saving ten or eleven bucks out of the fifteen we gave her each week for her allowance. The little dickens.)

This is what she said in the deposition:

I, Constance Ruth Goldkorn, being of sound mind and body, do solemnly swear and attest that what I am about to affirm is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.

I didn’t know who she was. When I saw her that first time I didn’t recognize her from Adam and would have hurried away as fast as my legs could carry me, but of course I didn’t, and probably couldn’t, even though I wanted to because when I saw her that first time it was a snow day and the sidewalks and streets were all covered with ice and snow and it was very slippery out, which is the reason, she said, the schools were closed and our paths happened to cross in the first place.

I told her excuse me, that I was on this errand for my mom, and started to walk away from her, and that’s when she started to cry.

Which I thought was very curious. Not that she was crying because it was very cold out, ten or fifteen below maybe, and there were tears in my eyes too, only the tears in my eyes were because of the cold weather, that like icy stinging you get in your eyes when it’s real cold and you almost feel your eyeballs are going to crack, or those sharp, sticky pains that you get in your temples. I’m a little embarrassed to tell this next part, but my attorney, Counselor Christopher Rockers, says that a deposition is a testimony taken down under oath for use in court, although in this case there’s not going to be any trial or anything and I’m making this deposition only because I want what happened to go on the record. Anyway, the point is, the lady was not only crying but crying so hard she had this runny nose too. (I was raised in a cemetery, I know about Nature. I don’t get the giggles if a boy cuts a fart. I don’t go all squeamy when it’s that time of month. I know that bodily functions often have nothing to do with whether a person has or has not got bad manners. I’m like a kid on a farm in that respect.) Anyway, what was so curious was that the tears were pouring out her eyes and running down her cheeks, and the mucus was dripping out her nostrils just exactly as if she was crying indoors in a warm, toasty room and not outside on a cold, blustery ten- or fifteen-degree-below-zero snow day. That’s the sort of tears and mucus they were — soft, room temperature tears and mucus.

My father, Rabbi Jerome Goldkorn, works for Shull and Tober Funeral Directors of Lud, New Jersey, and even if I am only fourteen years old, I’ve been around enough unhappiness, sadness, sorrow, gloom and grief in my time almost to be able to tell the difference between them (and, if you ask me, I think it was all five), and certainly to swear that whatever it was that caused all that weeping didn’t have anything to do with weather.

Though you’d almost think it could have because all she had on was this — I don’t know how to describe it exactly — not a kimono or shroud, more like what those ladies wear in Middle East countries so men can’t look at them, that they wrap around them like a shawl and that covers their heads too — big blue gown like a housewife who’s locked herself outside her own house.

Now this next thing is embarrassing because it’s on me. I don’t have a whole lot of friends. My father thinks it’s because of where we live, and there’s some truth in that because there certainly aren’t a whole bunch of kids around here to play with. Anyway, even if I don’t have a lot of friends, those kids who do get to know me, the kids in my car pool, for example, or some of the people who know me from class, will tell you I’m shy, that I keep to myself and like to mind my own business. I’ll give an example that comes to my mind. Last year I graduated from Junior High and there was some foulup at the printer’s about the school colors — they’re brown and white, not green and red — and our yearbooks all had to go back to the bindery and we didn’t get to see them until after we actually graduated. What happened was, they sent us this announcement that the yearbooks were ready and that we could come to the gym and get them if we brought our receipt along to show that we’d paid. Only I had a bad cold the day we were supposed to pick up the yearbook and didn’t get to the school until three days later. They had to open the gym especially for me (which as you can probably imagine was pretty embarrassing just in itself), and Mrs. Sayles, the lady from the office who opened the gym, went to the table where they’d put all the yearbooks. “It’s too bad you had that cold, Connie,” she said, “or you could have written in your friends’ yearbooks.” Then she said, oh, well, at least mine had been inscribed, that she’d seen to it herself that the kids wrote something in all the kids’ yearbooks who couldn’t pick them up on the regularly scheduled day they were supposed to. Well, after she told me that I never got up the nerve to even open my yearbook. Because she’d made them write something in it, you see. I’m shy. I keep to myself. I mind my own business. It would have been like reading someone else’s mail.

That’s why I didn’t ask her anything. Like why she was crying, or if she was lost — I’d never seen her before — or cold in just her thin blue wrap, and made out like it was perfectly natural to find someone in the street on the coldest day of the year, crying like a baby with stuff coming out of its face, and even — and I’m really embarrassed about this part because shyness and keeping to yourself and minding your business are one thing and only part of a person’s particular makeup, but this was something else altogether, not just disposition but character — that people around here were free to behave like they want to behave, as if letting someone suffer was democracy in action or something and not asking them if any thing’s wrong is a plus, rather than the cruel minus I knew it was even then. And wouldn’t have even if she hadn’t turned the tables on me, making out as if it was me and not her standing out there in the street in this summery lightweight with the wind tearing at my head, and the temperature banging my blood to a standstill.

I’ve already mentioned how I’m this agony expert. I wasn’t boasting. I wasn’t even trying to suggest that it’s a natural gift. I think it’s just what a person is accustomed to. If I’m able to tell which one is really in mourning and which one is probably only putting on a show, I don’t think I should get extra credit for it. As I say, it’s what a person gets accustomed to. You live and learn. I just happen to have this sort of perfect pitch for heartache. It’s unusual in a person of my years, I admit, but I come by it honestly. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that if I thought I was good at different shades of misery and grief, it was because I’d never seen this lady before. She made me feel insensitive. She made me feel like, well, some tone-deaf piker.

But this is a deposition and that last part, while it’s true as far as it goes, isn’t really what I was paying a lot of attention to at the time. I mean I really wasn’t into whether I was feeling insensitive or worrying about losing my perfect pitch for the somberness of the heart or not. Anyway, I hadn’t. Lost it, I mean. I could read hers, the somberness of her heart. And I was scared. Because what I saw there, in her woe, in her wracked heart, was the deepest mourning I’d ever seen. It was for me. She was in mourning for me!

I’m shy. I keep to myself. I mind my own business.

“Who are you?” I demanded.

She said, “I am the holy mother, Constance child.”

“What do you want? Why did you come? Why are you here?”

“For the harrowing of Lud’s cemeteries. For the harrowing of Pineoaks and Masada Gardens. To rescue the poor lost souls of righteous Jews.”

Well, maybe I am afraid of Lud, maybe I am. Maybe I am bothered by having only dead people for neighbors like my father thinks, or hurt because kids won’t play with me, who won’t even visit even though my mom drives the car pools and would not only go out of her way to pick them up in the first place but would bring them home too, even though I try to make my folks think that shyness and a solitary spirit and minding my business are part of my nature and not just these add-ons to my character like those cardboard cutouts in which you dress your paper dolls. (Because I’m not shy really. And don’t keep to myself by choice, or mind my business like some miser in his counting house in love with his ledger. No. Really I’m like some cheerleader and could name things even in Lud that swell my pom-pom heart and fill me with pride. Our monument carvers and landscapers, for example, are the best there are!) But even if I am, even if I am afraid to live here, even if I secretly agree with the kids who make fun of me because of what Lud stands for, I’m no anti-Semite! I’m no anti-Semite, and my first reaction was that the woman in blue was probably Seels’s wife. Seels is a vicious anti-Semite who probably felt exactly the same way the woman did. Only he wouldn’t have thought poor and he wouldn’t have thought righteous, and he wouldn’t have wanted to rescue them.

So, given the bite-my-tongue probables of my reputation, I did the only thing I could have done. I excused myself.

“Wait up. Hey, Connie, wait up,” said Holy Mother.

And, again given the house odds of my character, did. Like I might have waited on a girl friend, if I’d had one, who offered to walk me home. (I’ve seen them. Waiting for my mother, sometimes I’ve seen them. Boys walking boys, girls walking girls — they could almost be sweethearts, they could almost be sweethearts putting off for as long as they dared some significant curfew — as if, so long as they never quite reached their destination, or no, so long as they never stopped moving, shuffling in place, in front of their own addresses maybe, in motion like people treading water are in motion, wearing the pavement like mutual convoys in mutual seas. Waiting for Mom I’ve seen them make two-and-a-half round trips — and filled in, or at least wondered about, the others — that half or trip-and-a-half or even more that would have permitted them to come out even, as friends should. Or with one friend still graciously owing the other, or the other as graciously owed, the extra half trip that could always be made up tomorrow. Just speculating here as I — the other kids in the car pool off to one side — waited for my mother to come pick us all up, doing the even-steven, double-entry bookkeeping I thought was all there was to friendship.)

Did wait up. And strolled, just as if we were girl friends, Holy Mother and me, to the corner and back. (I’m fourteen-and-a-half years old but I’ve never had a sleepover or even been. So I don’t know what happens, if they’re more like camp than birthday parties, or closer to overnights in the woods than either, or treats after sports, say, the station wagon pulled up outside McDonald’s and the team piling out. Do they talk about boys? Who’s cute, who’s gross? Do they talk about how far they’ve gone, do they talk about who’s done it? Is it okay to go if it’s your time of month?) Walked to the corner with her and back to Sal’s, where my dad gets his hair cut. Walked to the corner, turned around and went to the florist’s and looked in Lou Pamella’s window and admired the flowers and Holy Mother said to me, “Oh, Connie, look at the lilies. Aren’t they gorgeous? I’ve always been partial to lilies.” And walked to the corner and crossed the street, and then we stopped outside Klein’s and Charney’s but neither of us said much and soon we were walking again. Despite the difference in our ages, or that she was divine and I was only this mortal female teenager, and just as if it wasn’t ten or fifteen below out, two best friends, chatting about life and stuff and harrowing Lud’s long main street.

Though you mustn’t think I’d forgotten that “rescue the poor lost souls of righteous Jews” remark.

I even called her on it, but she was real surprised, insulted I think, and explained how her family had always been Jewish, that she kept Shabbes even on the evening of the day her son got crucificated, busy as a bee, too busy to think, rushing around, so busy she didn’t have time to think about the neighbors, whether they’d remember to bring something, not to bring something, so she and the Magdalene doing it all, preparing the body, preparing the meal, the soup and boiled flanken, quick kasha cholent, kugel and sponge cake (though to tell the truth she wasn’t real hungry, no one was, or, if they were, they were too ashamed to admit it, and made the excuses people do at such times, that they were watching their diets, or it was too hot to eat, though she couldn’t think of anyone who’d come empty-handed — dishes of all sorts, dishes of all kinds, for every appetite — knishes and blintzes, latkes and noodles and farmer’s chop suey, challah and strudel, cabbage soup, beet borsch, lentil and barley bean), then lighting the candles like on any other Friday night. “It was a waste of good food,” said Holy Mother, “a sin with kids going hungry,” and then somebody suggested they go find some Roman soldiers who might still be peckish after eating their pound of flesh and maybe offer them some of the food, and Holy Mother saying how she knew that the person speaking meant it as a joke, but that she didn’t happen to be in the mood for joking right then (and added how she didn’t know at the time, telling me how you could have knocked her over with a feather, how, quite frankly, she would have thought you were a cuckoo clock if you’d have told her that two days later her son would be out of His tomb, gone, pfffft, just like that, and up in Heaven having the last laugh, or she wouldn’t have snapped at that fellow who made the joke about giving the soldiers some of the food, and that she might actually have gone out and done it herself, or invited them in, and that, who knows, it might have made better people out of them because didn’t they say you are what you eat, and would anyone in his right mind honestly argue that good kosher cooking wasn’t better for your disposition, personality and character than having to live on dry hardtack and stale Roman rations, but that seriously, it was a shame she hadn’t known, that not only would it have bucked them all up to have known what was what, but just to have had a sign, something, that remark to the gonif on the cross—“You will this day be with me in Paradise”—what, this was a sign? this was something you said to a child to calm it down), and that believe it or not, of all the things that happened that day, this was what she regretted the most, her rudeness to the fellow who’d made that remark about feeding the soldiers, that — and here she asked if I could keep a secret, and, oh, if ever there was a time for me to think, Well, good for you, Connie, that’s just exactly what best friends say to each other! that was the time for me to think it, even though I know that by going on the record like this I’m not keeping it — she personally had a very particular problem about hurting people’s feelings, what with all her husband Joseph was put through and suffered because of her. I didn’t know what she was talking about but understood just from the way she said it that it was something really important. I suppose I was testing her friendship, but I asked her flat out. She told me what had happened. “Oh, wow!” I said.

But I still wasn’t sure of her story, or even that she was really who she said she was, or believed her after I asked why she’d looked so sad when she first saw me and she said it was because she knew I had no one to play with and that Jesus had no one to play with when He was my age either, that once He went into the temple and answered all those questions the rabbis asked Him, how no kid His age ever went near Him again, that they called him “egghead” and “stuck-up brown nose” even though nothing could have been further from the truth (although even if she was His mom, she didn’t see how He could have failed to be at least a little conceited, knowing who He was and all, and the connections He had). And then she said how I only pretend to enjoy keeping to myself, and even told me about the yearbooks. But she could have gotten that stuff anywhere. Robert Hershorn knew (a man I know who has Alzheimer’s and that I tell my troubles to) and he might have come out of his fog long enough to say something, even to that vicious anti-Semite, Seels. I still couldn’t really be sure.

Holy Mother must have read my mind or something because she suggested we walk down to the cemetery together. (I was plenty terrified of what we’d see. Even though she’d explained it to me a couple of times already, I still didn’t have a real good idea of what “harrowing” was exactly, or what it might look like. I thought everything would be all dug up or something. Even if it was just the graves of people she’d already rescued it could still have been pretty grisly. And it was! At Pineoaks, in the new section of the cemetery near the landing field, there was a cluster of terrible gashes in the ground, the broken earth wet as fresh wounds. There was a smell like, and I guess I almost cried out. Didn’t, but almost. And would have run off if Holy Mother, who was very smart — that’s the thing about her, that she’s so smart as well as so nice — hadn’t put her hand on my arm, not in the way you’d catch a person’s sleeve and hold them there, but as if you were just reaching out to help them with their balance, and told me hush, don’t cry, that they were only fresh graves, not even graves yet actually, just holes for the Povermans, graves where they’d go when Daddy buried them tomorrow. Then I asked what’s that smell, and she said it was just what deep, fresh dirt smelled like in cold weather, a little like steam rising off of manure. I suppose I looked a little surprised when she said that about manure, but Holy Mother just smiled and said I mustn’t be priggish, it was bodily functions that kept us alive in the first place, and didn’t she just get through telling me how after the Crucification she and the Magdalene prepared his body — and that Son of God or no Son of God, that was no picnic — and then just rinsed off afterward in the river with a little ash log soap and went in and made supper? But I depose that even if those holes were only for the Poverman family, two kids and their parents killed the day before in a tragic accident where no one wore their seat belts, harrowing was pretty grisly anyway, probably all the more so because nothing was disturbed — not the graves or the gravestones or the perpetual care. There weren’t even any footsteps in the snow! “The only way,” Holy Mother said, “anyone could tell I was even here is by the little stones and pebbles I left underneath the snow on the tops of the markers and monuments.” Which made me, though I suppose I ought to be ashamed to admit it — and really am, now—a little suspicious, because there she was, talking about lentil soup and boiled flanken and farmer’s chop suey and steam rising off manure and bodily functions and washing the dead one minute, and sneaking little stones and pebbles in under the snow so you couldn’t even notice where they’d been slipped in the next. It was grisly. It was a contradiction. I told her it was a contradiction. “Lord love you, child,” said Holy Mother, “but didn’t you know that eating and drinking, sleeping and moving your bowels are bodily functions, and that magic and faith and seeing to it your soul is saved are bodily functions too? I swan but you’re a funny little girl. You’re a funny little girl, I do declare.”)

Maybe I just didn’t get the hang of harrowing.

“Think of it as a good, brisk spring cleaning,” Holy Mother told me.

But I still didn’t get it, didn’t get it really. When she said that about the good, brisk spring cleaning, all I could think of was moving the dead people out of the way to vacuum their pillows and coffin linings, or polishing their caskets with Lemon Pledge.

“Think of it as a legal loophole, as an ambiguity, or outright omission in the wording of a contract. As a means of escaping a difficulty,” my counselor, Christopher Rockers, just put in.

But I meant then. Now I get it. I’m saying what I meant then.

So we came to a part of the cemetery where I was walking with my dad just this summer, the part where his old friend Jacob Heldshaft is buried, the one who used to sing in the minyan with him, that they called all those funny names—“Puffy Pisher,” “Yiddish Mockeybird,” “So-and-so Canary.” The part where Samuel Shargel is buried, who my father told me was related to a man in the slipcover business, and Ira Kiefer, that Dad says used to be this big-time uncle with ten nephews and nieces that Mom invited to come swimming over at our place after the funeral. The reason I remember all this so clearly is that Holy Mother happened to mention that Jacob Heldshaft had been harrowed because he had such a wonderful voice and Jesus wanted him not so much for his righteous soul as for his beautiful falsetto.

Which I really didn’t think was fair.

“Pshaw, child,” Holy Mother scolded, “fair? Don’t go getting started into fair or we’ll be here all night.” She looked around the cemetery. “I need this? All my people have been Jewish,” she said.

“These people are Jewish.”

“Sure,” she said, “and I have to roust them. What am I, a bouncer?” She confessed she didn’t like being away from Joseph, and she started to giggle.

“What,” I asked, “what?”

“Nothing,” she said.

“No, really,” I said, “what?”

“You’d have had to have been there.”

“No, really, come on,” I said, coaxing. (Because in all the time I’ve lived here, Holy Mother is the closest I’ve come to having a best friend, or any friend at all.)

“Well,” she said, “it’s so hard for him, he’s always been such a good sport about it.” Holy Mother had the giggles real bad. It was good to see my friend laughing.

“What?”

“Well, he says he doesn’t know what to call Him.”

“Who?”

“Jesus. God. Either one.” She was really laughing now. It was the second time that day I’d seen her in tears. “He calls Them, he calls Them — his mahuten! He calls Them his moketenestah!” And her nose was running too. From laughter. From pure joy. She wiped her eyes, then blew her nose in a Kleenex I gave her. “Oh,” she said, recovering, “oh. I can’t remember when I’ve had such a good laugh. Well,” she said, “what were we talking about? Oh, I remember. You were mentioning about what was fair. Don’t come to me with such notions. Is it fair that one man gets hauled off to Heaven because he sings falsetto and another like Ira Kiefer over there should die all alone not only without a wife or children to mourn him, but not to leave any relation behind, even a niece, even a nephew? Or Samuel Shargel, what about him? Everyone in his family a miserable failure, everyone, never to have had even a distant cousin in the slipcover business he might have been proud of!”

I dusted snow from one of the monuments.

“What about this one?” I said, pointing to the stone, to some big Hebrew carving from which poor old Mr. Hershorn had taught me to read. “Did she get harrowed?” Holy Mother looked in the direction I was pointing and squinted.

“I can’t read, child,” she admitted.

And I’m ashamed of this part too.

Because I thought for a moment my friend was a phony. If she couldn’t read, how did she know who to harrow? Or did she just run helter skelter through a cemetery, harrowing at will? Or how did she know who Shargel was? Or Kiefer? Or the Puffy Pisher?

“I just do,” she said softly, reading my mind, “I just know,” and she began to cry.

When I asked why she was crying she said it was because I doubted her, and that when she was my age it was unusual for a girl to learn to read and that if she did, ninety-nine times out of a hundred it turned out she was a witch and she’d had enough trouble just trying to explain Immaculate Conception and the virgin birth without being called up for being illiterate too. This must have brought back some pretty bad memories because she started weeping harder than ever, so I fished around in my pockets and found another fresh Kleenex and gave it to her.

“Oh,” she said, glancing down at the Kleenex I’d handed her, “I’ve wiped off my stigmata, haven’t I?” She touched her dry eyes. “I’ve rubbed it all away.”

I didn’t know what stigmata were.

“Usually blood, usually wounds and sores,” said Holy Mother. “But tears and runny noses too. Even a rash, even gas. A statue on an altarpiece puking.”

Then something unusual happened. I noticed I wasn’t cold anymore. I mean I hadn’t been conscious of the cold for a long while anyway, but now I was aware I wasn’t cold. And of how beautiful everything is if only the weather doesn’t get in your way. I mean a rainy day if you don’t get wet, or a bright, sunny summer afternoon if you aren’t hot. Well, that goes double for the ice and snow when the wind is howling and the sky is leaden and the temperature is hanging around negative ten or fifteen. I guess winter would be just about the most beautiful season there is if it wasn’t for the cold. People are pretty perky in it as it is — having snowball fights and going skiing and putting on ice carnivals and making snow forts. And all of a sudden I wanted to frolic, had this incredible urge to frolic, and felt this just tremendous burst of energy. It was all I could do to keep myself from scooping some snow off poor, sad Samuel Shargel’s grave and popping Holy Mother with a snowball. I guessed what I felt was the opposite of stigmata. Joy like a sort of brush fire. And knew even then that I’d better resist my impulse, not only because it would have been disrespectful not to, but because with all I was feeling, the joy and high energy, I would have knocked Holy Mother halfway into the middle of next week. (But knew, too, that it wasn’t all I could do to keep myself from packing a snowball to fling in her face, that with all I was feeling I could probably resist anything, any temptation, any pressure or urgency, the very heat and cold I was suddenly so conscious were no longer factors in my life.) (“A state of grace, yes,” Holy Mother said, breaking into my thought.)

But had to do something, and felt myself pulled by a stronger force than even my own high spirits toward poor old Sam Shargel’s tombstone and, before I knew what was happening, reached down toward the snow. Which I pulled off the marker, brushed off the marker.

“I’ll teach you.”

“Oh, Connie, no.”

“I will.”

“No,” she said, “you don’t have to.”

“I’d like to. I want to.”

She saw I meant it and let me.

I, Constance Ruth Goldkorn, of 336 Main, Lud, New Jersey, do hereby depose and affirm that I taught Holy Mother how to read a sort of Hebrew for Beginners off the clean, snow-swept tombstone of Samuel Shargel, 1921–1973, one school snow day in Pineoaks Cemetery. We used his epitaph, reading the big Hebrew letters off the marble slab like Moses calling out the Ten Commandments. As I say, it was how Mr. Hershorn taught me.

Mostly we worked on learning to recognize phonemes and blends, her syllabication skills, homophones, consonant digraphs, hard and soft c and g sounds, and reviewing vowel patterns, affixes and suffixes.

If I gave her a report card I’d have said: “Holy Mother works conscientiously and completes the assigned work with consistent effort. She takes pride in organizing the material and cheerfully accepts constructive criticism, and is always on task. She was a joy to work with this semester.”

As a matter of fact, I think she enjoyed it too. She told me it was very moving and that she hadn’t had such a good time since Christ knows when. She said I reminded her of the Juggler of Our Lady.

I remarked how she was such a natural scholar it was a shame they didn’t have women’s lib back in her day.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” said Holy Mother.

“But it is,” I said. “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

“Oh, Connie, my dear,” she said, looking around Pineoaks, looking across Lud and over to Masada Gardens, “a soul is an even more terrible thing to waste,” and she invited me to come along as she completed her rounds. (Which it turned out weren’t so grisly after all. There’s really not very much to harrowing. It’s one of those words that sounds worse than it actually is. Like a dog whose bark is worse than its bite. We’d be going along and Holy Mother would just pause by a grave. What took all the time was having to stop and brush the snow off the monuments so Holy Mother could practice her reading. I wasn’t a bit cold. It was still ten or fifteen below out — it had quit snowing, but the sky was grayer than it had been earlier and the wind was blowing more forcefully, so it may even have been a bit cooler — but I didn’t feel it. I still had all this energy left over from my state of grace. It could have gone down to absolute zero and it wouldn’t have meant any more to me than if I’d opened a window on a fine day in spring.)

When she suddenly pulled up and stopped.

“You harrow this one.”

“Who, me?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Oh, but I couldn’t.”

“Certainly you can.”

“But I wouldn’t know how.”

“There’s nothing to it.”

“I don’t know what’s involved.”

“Didn’t you ever have a birthday party?”

“Yes.”

“Was there a cake?”

“Certainly.”

“Were there candles on it you had to blow out?”

“Of course.”

“Well, there you are then.”

“I blow out the candles?”

“You make a wish.”

It was scary. I mean, so much was riding on it. It wasn’t like teaching Holy Mother how to read. Suppose I made a mistake? It meant that the person wouldn’t be rescued, that his lost, Jewish soul would never see God. It was so grisly.

“Go on,” Holy Mother said, “go ahead.”

I shut my eyes tight. I took a deep breath.

“Harrow Harry Jacobson,” I wished.

“Well,” said Holy Mother, “I guess that about does it.”

“I’m finished?”

“I think so, yes.”

“How many souls of righteous Jews did we rescue? How many did there turn out to be?”

“Counting the ones I did before I met you?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” said Holy Mother, “seven or eight.”

When she left that evening she thanked me for teaching her to read and said what a pleasure it was to have met me. I told her likewise I’m sure, and that she’d been like a friend, or at least a big sister. I already missed her by the time I got home.

And couldn’t stop thinking about them. The dead. The poor souls who remained unrescued.

Because if there were righteous souls then there must be unrighteous souls, too.

The earth of Lud stocked as any lake or river. (My dad this Johnny Appleseed of the damned. Sowing the not-just-dead but downright unacceptable. Scattering and casting, tilling and turning with some special sorry husbandry, pitching his seed and vegetive milt into all the imponderables and mixed variables of the foreclosed earth, its busted topsoils and clays and unknown weathers — moisture and light and temperature. With blind abandon shifting from one medium to another without even knowing, offering to the soil what was the water’s or sky’s.) All Lud a ruined continent, a land of drought and blight. Each plot this failed farm.

And how do you think I felt? Second-guessing Daddy’s handiwork, not wanting to but mixing in anyway? Already, for that matter, mixed in from the minute I first ran into Holy Mother window shopping along Lud’s main street? My sympathies shot. All that loose grief I’d felt all my life, or at least for as long as I’d understood where I was living, suddenly altering from one state to another like those solids and liquids and gases they tell you about in school and which are always in some perpetual tumult of rearrangement. That grief. That loose grief. Now you feel it, now you don’t.

Because what they kept in those coffins, besides mere personal effects, I mean, the jewelry, eyeglasses, hip wallets, watches, snapshots and belt buckles, and just sheer meltdown of the remains, all the corrupt soup of their spoiled biodegradables, was some hot elixir from which, in time, anything could grow except a serviceable soul. (Coffins, I supposed, would slosh if you shook them.) Plus that other, impersonal effect, their nonviable souls like counterfeit coins or rotten teeth. (Though something about them at once animate and doomed as cut blossoms or dime-store turtles.)

My niggled, watered, here-today/gone-tomorrow griefs downshifted as some truck on a steep grade to something more like sorrow than grief, and then taken down another tick or two to sadness, say, or even gloom. Until it wasn’t even unhappiness anymore (though I couldn’t stop thinking about them, I mean worrying), was out of that spectrum altogether and had entered some new stage with which I, for all my power to take melancholy’s measure and my perfect pitch for heartache, was unfamiliar.

Until it came to me. Until what bothered me so came to me. Just came to me. I hesitate to say with the force of revelation. (I mean I’ve been there. Hadn’t I spent almost an entire snow day with Holy Mother? Didn’t we hang together? Weren’t we pals? Best friends even? Hadn’t she already told me some fairly intimate stuff about her immediate family that wasn’t even in the Bible — I know, I looked it up — and that would probably be worth a small fortune to me and set me up for life if I could just get to the right people with it? Hadn’t I, for that matter, taught her to read? Anyway, the point is, revelation isn’t forceful at all. It’s subtle as sunlight, spotty and gradual as shade.)

It was taste. What I felt for those unrighteous souls in Pineoaks and Masada Gardens and everywhere salting Lud’s earth, turned out to be just a question of taste. It was a matter of civic, or even of hometown pride. Maybe not even taste finally, maybe nothing so grand as taste — didn’t I already tell you I’m no anti-Semite, and isn’t it already in the record that the big thing I got out of the time I spent with Holy Mother was chiefly to do with the joy parts and not much to do with religion at all, because I mean, what the heck, hey, I’m still a kid, there isn’t any Song of Bernadette going on here or anything — maybe only good old-fashioned boosterism, more like who I might want to win the Homecoming Game than anything as serious and important as God. And maybe in back of taste or boosterism or hometown loyalty I was just my mother’s little girl running on pure baleboste instinct. Maybe that’s the real reason I wanted them harrowed. As baleboste as Holy Mother herself. Wasn’t she the one who’d told me to think of it as a good, brisk spring cleaning?

I went to Pineoaks.

It was easier this time without the snow to deal with.

“Harrow Simon Fingerweiss.”

“Harrow Philip Pfeiffer,” I said, weeding the garden.

“Harrow Rose and Frances Feldman.”

“Harrow the Mitgangs, harrow the Blooms. Harrow the Helfmans and Goldstones.”

“Stop!” shrieked Holy Mother. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Oh,” I said, “you scared me.”

“Just what do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was sprucing up a bit. Did I do something wrong?”

“Oh, child,” she said, “oh, my poor child.”

Let the record show that I make no claims. Let the record show I’m no better than the next person. Let it show I make mistakes too. That just because the Holy Mother revealed herself to me and once chose to spend the better part of a day in my company doesn’t entitle me to go all hoity-toity, or get a swelled head, or lord it over the next guy. It didn’t give me any rights in the swanks and swaggers, high-and-mighties, or holier-than-thou’s at all. Where do I get off throwing my weight around, I mean?

Well, I don’t. I just don’t. Because it’s one thing to whine and complain and criticize the way your dad might do a certain thing, and another altogether to go and do it any better yourself. I’m only sorry for whatever confusion or inconvenience I may inadvertently have caused the Mitgangs and Helfmans, the Goldstones, Feldmans and Blooms. I’m only sorry if I got Philip Pfeiffer’s or Simon Fingerweiss’s hopes up. Though I perfectly understand that it’s too late and can make no difference to their families, I would like the record to show that none of this was my intention when I undertook to harrow their souls. I hereby apologize to Heaven, too.

On the other hand, how was I to know? Any more than my father? I’m not trying to set myself up as any big-deal Bible scholar or anything, but it’s my opinion — and soon I’m going to show how I got the wherewithal, as it were, to back this up — that the reason I fell into this trap is the old business of the forcelessness of revelation. (It’s already in the record how it’s subtle as sunshine, spotty as shade?) Rome nor anything else worth bubkes wasn’t built in a day. My experiences with Holy Mother have taught me that much, at least! (Don’t feel bad, Daddy.Those evangelists on TV have no more authority than Jews in this respect. “Accept Jesus, accept Jesus,” they cry. “Let Him come aboard your hearts.” As if that was all there were to it. As if Jesus has no say in the matter. As if all you have to do is declare the war and the day is yours. When it’s got nothing to do with stand up to be counted, sit down, Bingo! you’re saved. Because what it’s really got to do with isn’t just declaring the war but laying the siege!)

“Oh, oh,” groaned Holy Mother, “my poor, poor, sweet lost child,” and took me in her arms and guided me to one of the benches where she sat down and drew me onto her lap and held and comforted me, undone and forlorn, crooning “poor child, sweet child,” over and over again above me like we were figures in a Pietà.

The next day she started sending the saints. Because, make no mistake, this was her siege — Holy Mother’s. She went to a lot of trouble with me. An all-out effort.

(A footnote should go here, what, back when I was learning how to write term papers last semester, I was taught to stick beside an asterisk and write N.B., Latin for nota bene, or note well — a sort of disclaimer, a sort of alarm. My footnote has to do with the disinformation there is concerning the so-called supernatural “visions” or “manifestations” made by the saints and even the Godhead when It chooses to present.

(I understand this is only one girl’s experience, and how if anyone appreciates that there might be more than one way to skin a cat it would certainly be God, but it all seemed so direct and straightforward a procedure, I find it almost impossible to believe it’s ever, or ever very often, otherwise. I acknowledge it could be, and agree there are historical instances when it probably was, but I’ll lay you dollars to donuts those precedents were rare exceptions. For one, there’s the forcelessness-of-revelation thing. By which I never meant feints and codes, riddles and misdirection. Put yourself in Heaven’s place a minute. Walk a mile in its golden slippers. The name of the game is communication. Why revelation is forceless has less to do with the subtlety of the message than with the stubbornness, or even stupidity, of the person for whom it’s intended. Didn’t I already say I’m still a kid? So even if I’m wrong about the forcelessness of revelation, tell me, who’s more set in her ways than a kid? Who takes more convincing? Anyway, the point is, it’s always one belief looking to take over another belief. That’s the reason for the hard, though forceless, sell, the constant repetition. That’s the reason they kept coming at me from all sides, the reason it was always a little like Rush Week.

(So let the record show, and let me begin by laying to rest, some misconceptions.

(Ready?

(Divine agency does not work through the medium of barely legible images showing through certain kinds of paint in certain lights at certain times of day. It doesn’t rub itself into the warp and woof of cloth. The Shroud of Turin, for example, is no Polaroid of Jesus. I showed Holy Mother a picture from a magazine and asked her directly. You know what she said? “What, my Jesus? How do people come up with such mishegoss? This fella? Where’s the resemblance? This isn’t Jesus, this is just some stubby little gypsy.”

(And statues of saints neither weep nor bleed. They don’t wink or perspire or pull a long face. They never move their lips or open their mouths to speak. God doesn’t use ventriloquists’ dummies to make His points. Neither does He rely on Nature. Oh, He splits the Red Sea if there’s a need, or throws a Flood, but in the piecemeal One-on-one of a conversion He doesn’t like to disturb the topography. He’ll hesitate to pull a river from a rock, say, or lay down an instant copse of trees onto the barren earth like you’d put up a fence.

(Holy Mother explained this, too. “He doesn’t like to scare you. He’s very gentle. Didn’t He send the Angel Gabriel to explain what was going to happen to me? And, after it happened, after the Lord had already been with me and I’d begun to show so people could see, didn’t I concentrate and study on it as hard as I ever concentrated or studied on anything in my life to try to figure out just when it could have happened, and all I could ever come up with was just this thin memory I had of a draft I happened to be sitting in when I was sewing a few garments together one time for my dowry after Joseph and I were already betrothed. So He’s gentle. Whatever else He is, He’s gentle. Even though He’s only ever satisfied when His arrangements uproot and change the world!”

(No. The last thing that bunch is is shy. Gentle, yes, but persistent. They have something on their mind they let you know about it and don’t nod at you from the woodwork or send you signals from the plaster of Paris. I’ll tell you what they’re like — Scrooge’s ghosts.)

My first visitor was a young woman who looked to be maybe seventeen or eighteen years old. At first glance she could have been my older sister. Holy Mother introduced us.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” St. Myra Weiss said.

“St. Myra Weiss?”

“I thought so too,” I told Mr. Rockers. “I was really surprised. She looked too preppy to be a saint. But Holy Mother vouched for her. She must have been legit.”

“Go on.”

“She was the patron saint of kids whose dads get transferred and have to relocate in a different city.”

“Wait a minute,” the attorney said.

“I know. I was surprised myself,” I told him. “When she said what her job was I looked right at Holy Mother and rolled my eyes. I think I offended her. St. Myra. She got kind of defensive.”

“Not army brats.”

“Beg pardon?” I said.

“Someone else handles army brats. St. Captain Ralph R. Sweeney.”

“Hold it right there, young lady. Do I have to remind you that this is a deposition and that you’re under oath?”

“I know that. Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I know how ridiculous this is going to make me look when it gets out? I know all that. Did I make it snow? Did I lower the temperature so everything would freeze and they’d have to declare a snow day at the exact time Holy Mother was going to be in my neighborhood and practically guarantee that we’d run into each other? I didn’t do that stuff. What do you want from me? It’s God’s plan.”

“All right, Connie, that’s all right. Calm down. You can calm down now. Here’s a Kleenex. All right, you’ve got your own hankie. That’s fine.”

She was the patron saint of kids whose dads get transferred and have to relocate in a different city.

I told her in that case I thought she might have the wrong party.

“Aren’t you Jerry Goldkorn’s daughter?”

“That’s right.”

“I have the right party.”

Her father was an executive in Coca-Cola Bottling’s corporate headquarters down in Atlanta, Georgia. St. Myra was born there. “I was a Georgia peach,” she told me, smiling, looking down. “It’s true, I was. A Georgia peach. Oh, I loved Atlanta, loved my friends, our life there. Loved our club. You know my parents had to bribe me to get me to agree to go off with them to Europe in the summers? They promised that after I graduated high school I wouldn’t have to go East to college, or any further away from Atlanta than Agnes Scott College for Women in Decatur.

“I was as happy with my lot as any sixteen-year-old girl in America. Because I was best friends with nineteen dozen other kids just like me. Who were as happy with theirs. Who had the same credit cards for the same malls and department stores, who got the same clothing allowances and took their lessons from the same piano and ballet and figure-skating teachers and worked out at the same fitness centers and had children-of-paid-up members’ privileges at the same country clubs. Who went to the same humongous open parties on weekends in each others’ houses when our parents were out of town and then went on to meet at the same fast-food drive-ins when the parties got busted at midnight. Who got our learner’s permits at the same time, and our licenses, and, by default, the same second or third or fourth family car, till we’d get, for graduation, or some special birthday, the same cute red or yellow convertible of our very own and who couldn’t wait to be yuppies!”

“But you said you—”

“I am. I’m telling you. The patron saint of kids whose dads get transferred and have to relocate in a different city. It’s just that I was always such a good sport.

“Daddy called me in in the summer of my seventeenth year when I was on the cusp of my junior year in high school.

“ ‘Coca-Cola’s just bought out this blockbuster diet soft drink company in the Midwest, sweetheart, and they want your dad to head it up. Now I know, I know, the only home you’ve ever known has been right here in Atlanta, and that you’re very happy here, and that it’s a little unfair to ask you to leave your friends, and normally, well, normally, darn it, I wouldn’t think of asking you to make that sort of sacrifice, but the soft-drink business is entering a new phase. It’s expanding and changing right before our eyes, and if we don’t expand and stretch and change right along with it, well, sir, we’re going to be left at the starting gate and there won’t be any money for balls and country clubs and Junior League revels. I’m not asking now. I have too much respect for you for that. I’m requesting. If you say no then it’s no, and you and Mummy and Bubba and me will just have to stay put right where we are. If it were your senior year rather than the junior year you’re entering I wouldn’t even be requesting, or inquiring either for that matter, but as I see it you’ll have two whole years to settle in and put your life together and get yourself a gang as close to the one you have here in Atlanta as, given the demographics, you can get in Milwaukee.’

“It was the most disagreeable decision I ever had to make. I assented at once, of course, and even made out that I was getting a little tired of Atlanta anyway and actually looked forward to the move.”

“But you loved Atlanta.”

“A patron saint of kids whose dads get transferred and relocate in a different city must be as devoted to her father as she is to that generation of children for whom she is the earnest, supplicatory object of appeal.”

“I see.”

“Milwaukee was a disaster.”

“You couldn’t duplicate—?”

“Kids our age are a demographics unto ourselves. Of course there was to be had in Milwaukee what was to be had in Atlanta. Doesn’t Milwaukee have malls and country clubs, doesn’t it have roadsters and fitness centers, the children of the CEO classes, credit cards, cotillions, open-invitationed weekend bashes by the pool when the folks leave town for a few days? Doesn’t it have fast-food hangouts and not only those places you can go to for a fake ID, but those other places you can go to where they will be honored? Of course there is to be duplicated in Milwaukee anything that had already been imprinted upon you in Atlanta.”

“Then what’s the big deal?”

“Because I was a Georgia peach. Because when I opened my mouth to speak they laughed and called me names and said, ‘Hey, get her, she talks like a nigger.’

“Because they always think they have to draw a line somewhere, so they draw it around you, or around themselves in some tight-knit, gerrymandered circle. Because there’s always this eleventh-hour, last-ditch, last-minute exclusivity among any given nineteen dozen best friends, Atlanta, Milwaukee, New Orleans or Paris, France, either.”

“Tell how they martyred you, dear.”

“They martyred me by pretending to capitulate, Holy Mother.”

“They betrayed you.”

“Yes, ma’am. I was invited to one of those Friday or Saturday night parties that they didn’t have to bother to invite anyone else to because no one else ever even had to be invited. One of them called out to me after our ten o’clock French class.

“ ‘Myra. Myra Weiss. Myra, hold up.’

“ ‘Chapters eleven and twelve,’ I told her. ‘Mademoiselle says we’re responsible for the subjunctive and all the idioms with “coup” in them.’

“ ‘No,’ she said, ‘not that.’

“ ‘Monday. The quiz is Monday.’

“ ‘Not that either, silly. I know when the quiz is. Clyde Carlin’s folks are going out of town this weekend. He’s throwing a party. Around nineish.’

“ ‘I know that.’

“ ‘He wants you to come.’

“ ‘He does?’

“ ‘He asked me to invite you, didn’t he?’ ”

But when she showed up at Clyde Carlin’s house that Friday at around nine she didn’t see any cars in the driveway, though all the lights seemed to be on on the first floor. St. Myra could have kicked herself for coming so early. In Atlanta, too, these things never started on time. “Well,” she told herself, “somebody’s got to be first,” parked her car, and went up to the door and pulled on the bell.

Clyde Carlin’s little brother, Ben, opened the door.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” she said, “I’m Myra. Your brother asked me to come to his party.”

“Myra Weiss?” Ben said.

“That’s right.”

“I’m Ben,” Ben said, “Clyde’s brother. Clyde told me to tell you that our parents changed their plans and didn’t go out of town this weekend after all, and that our party’s called off but Suzy Locke-Miller is having one at her house instead.”

He gave her Susan’s address and precise instructions how to get there. She knew something was wrong, but it was already the middle of the spring semester, nine months since they’d moved up from Atlanta, and this was the first time they’d ever even seemed to open their ranks for her. She couldn’t take the chance. So she took the carefully drawn map Clyde had left with Ben to give to her and started out for Suzy Locke-Miller’s.

Where the same thing happened. Only this time it was an older sister who came to the door.

“Yes? What is it?”

“Does Suzy Locke-Miller live here?”

“Who wants to know?”

“I’m Myra Weiss.”

“Sooz went off to a par — Weiss? Hold on a minute, she left a note.”

And left the girl in the hall and went off to find it. It was so apparently hurried and scribbled it might almost have been what it purported to be, a hastily written apology, an explanation Myra couldn’t quite follow saying there’d been a change in plans, that the party had been moved again and that Myra must come to Franklin Bradbury’s house. She gave the address, and directions how to get there, and even put down a number Myra could call should she get lost.

She knew what was what now. What they were doing to her. But she kept on going anyway. She had to. Because she was into her martyrdom now, she said. She was on this scavenger hunt for her martyrdom. At one house it was the parents themselves who sent her on to the next place where the putative party was supposedly being held.

She drove from house to house, really seeing Milwaukee for the first time, reminded, in those pricey suburbs, how much like Atlanta it was after all.

It was when she was on her way to the seventh or eighth house that she became momentarily blinded by her own tears and missed the curve and swerved off the winding street and ran into a tree on the lawn of the very house where, ironically, the party they had been hiding from her actually was going on. It was Clyde Carlin himself who heard the crash and was the first on the scene. When he saw what had happened and who it was it had happened to, it took his breath away. The girl from French class came running up to him.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” she said.

“Don’t look,” Clyde said.

“No,” she said, “what?”

“Great goddamn,” Clyde said, “it’s the nigger. It’s that Myra. She’s gone and crashed the damned party!”

“But that’s not my problem,” I told St. Myra. “My father wasn’t transferred, he hasn’t relocated in a different city.”

“It’s still a question of being lost where one is,” St. Myra Weiss said; “Of becoming separated, locked from some Palestine of the heart’s desiring. You’re already relocated. I’m your man.”

So she sold me a candle.

“She sold you a candle? She did?”

“It’s how they live. You take money for depositions, don’t you? It’s how you live.”

“Go on.”

There’s not a whole lot more to tell. More saints came marching in. Holy Mother thought we should become better acquainted. So both sides would know what they were dealing with. It’s pretty specialized. More than a Jewish girl raised on the notion of Moses and monotheism would have guessed. I told Holy Mother.

“Land sakes, child, is that what you think? That God doesn’t have helpers, that He’s this Workaholic Who thinks He has to do everything Himself or nothing would ever get done? No, hon, that’s not what He’s like at all. He don’t only love us, He trusts us.”

She must have brought on more than a dozen. They just kept coming. Before I knew it I’d run out of money to buy their candles from them, but they kept coming anyway. Saints of shopping for a birthday present when you’ve been invited to a party at the last minute and the stores are all closed. Saints for throwing an outfit together when either they’ve seen everything you have, or what they haven’t seen is at the cleaner’s and you’ve got nothing to wear. Acne saints. Saints for your period. Saints of the S.A.T.’s and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory tests. Saints for split ends, for limp or oily hair. Brittle nails saints. Saints for putting in your contact lenses, or finding them again when they pop out in the grass.

“What’s that? What’s that smell?”

“It’s all right, Counselor, he’s had an accident. Mr. Hershorn? Mr. Hershorn, it’s Connie. That’s all right, no harm done, you’ve had a little accident, Mr. Hershorn. I’ll have you cleaned up in a jiffy.”

Then I interrupted my deposition and asked Counselor Rockers where the rest room was. I excused myself and led Mr. Hershorn off to make him more comfortable.

While Mr. Hershorn and I were in the washroom, Holy Mother appeared to me one more time. She watched what I was doing without saying anything. Then she said I would probably be a saint myself one day. When I asked of what, she just shrugged and said she didn’t really know but possibly of incontinent old men, and when I told her that didn’t sound like such a hot job to me, she allowed as how that might be so but that somebody had to do it.

This is the sworn deposition of Constance Ruth Goldkorn of 336 Main, Lud, New Jersey 07642. Present in attendance were Elizabeth Packer, 1143 Hapthorn St., East Orange, New Jersey 07019, Certified Court Reporter and Notary Public within and for the Township of Lud, New Jersey; Christopher Rockers, lawyer of 4 Rosewood Ct., Passaic Park, New Jersey 07055, and Robert Hershorn of the Hershorn Monument Company, 105 Main, Lud, New Jersey 07642.

This deposition is for immediate release to all northern New Jersey newspapers, TV and radio stations, school districts, synagogues, churches, hospitals, funeral directors and to the Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Newark.