Rabbi Gabrielle's Defiance (31 page)

No one displayed astonishment when Kye Naah
let himself into Gabby's home with his own key and planted a
familiar kiss on the back of Gabby's neck while she was bent over
arranging spring flowers for the centerpiece. Introductions were a
bit superfluous since he already knew everybody from Gabby's
detailed descriptions. They, on the other hand, studied him as
though a specimen under a microscope. So this is the man Gabby had
been so taken with!

Uncomfortable being idle in the company of
active people, Kye immediately assumed various kitchen chores doled
out by Lawrence Bourne, who had once been a professional chef in
Boston, but had given up his passion for cooking to operate a
series of bed-and-breakfasts. When Kye eventually joined Gabby's
team working on the table, she took his arm and kissed him upon the
cheek, confirmation of a relationship closer than friendship.

Asa and Anina arrived last. He dressed in a
conservative gray suit with a maroon necktie that Gabby recognized
as Anina's taste in men's clothing. A large silver pin in the
design of a blue heron on the lapel of her stunning scarlet jacket
immediately became an object of conversation. By five o'clock,
preparations for the seder were complete and the guests gathered in
the living room to chat. No cocktails. Gabby warned there would be
plenty of sweet kosher wine or Lydia's Chardonnay to consume during
the festivities.

Since their meeting at Georgetown Hospital,
Anina and Kye had spoken often. To Gabby's guests, she praised him
for establishing a conference link between Georgetown Hospital's
Operating Theater and the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. During
the first phase of reconstructing Tybee Morgenstern's lower lip,
Dr. Mayer Brouggen in Sweden supervised Hank Resnick implementing
his Swedish technique. This cyber link produced an unexpected
dividend for Anina. In planning for Tybee's first operation, her
hostility with Hank Resnick bottomed out and he invited her to
scrub-in and assist his surgical team. Having tasted the fruit of
Kye's technology, Georgetown Hospital employed Politicstoday to
upgrade its Internet linkage, a paying customer much appreciated.
The hospital's president, who generally looked upon his
institution's quarrelsome physicians as a necessary nuisance he
would like to do without, but couldn't, started answering Anina's
phone calls. Her name inexplicably turned up on a list of
candidates for the hospital's Medical Executive Committee.

At the seder table, Gabby sat Kye on her
right and Clementine Mountolive on her left. Clemmy's animation
demonstrated how fond she was of Aunt Gabby. Due to tension between
her divorced parents over what church to attend, she participated
in no religious school training and was fascinated with the
Haggadah's rendition of the Exodus from Egypt. Her questions
revealed a thirst for more information about the Bible. When it was
time for the youngest member of the family to recite
The Four Questions,
Aunt Gabby walked Clemmy patiently
through a transliteration from the original Hebrew, then an English
translation. Gabby followed by chanting a traditional melody she
had sung almost every year since her childhood.

"Mah nishtana… Why is this night different
from all other nights?" the first question began.

Gabby asked Clementine to read the answer in
the
Haggadah,
and added a personal
observation. "For me," she gazed to her left, then right, matching
glances from the adults through eyes on the boundary of tears.
"This night is special because I have wonderful friends to share
it. For years now, I've dreamed about you sitting at my table for
Passover. I couldn't do it because I felt obliged to attend other
Seders. Couldn't even go home to L.A. to celebrate with my father
or to Cleveland, with my sister's family." Soft whispers ceased
altogether. "You guys have stuck with me through all the storms and
I truly love you for it. And tonight, you've brought people special
to you. To the question
Mah Nishtanah
? I
answer, this night is different from all other nights because you
are here."

Kye's hand reached across the table in full
view to seize Gabby's. His fingers wrapped around hers and
squeezed. This inspired Lydia to do the same with Daisy
Seasongood.

Gabby's eyes remained glassy as she gave the
first of four formal answers to the question, "Why is this night
different? On all other nights we eat regular bread, but tonight,
only matzah…"

Chuck and Kye appeared to get on well,
chatting through the floral arrangement centered on her table. Like
a dog sniffing a newcomer to establish rapport, Chuck protectively
sniffed out men hovering around Gabby. After dinner, he and Kye
formed a dishwashing team to attack the mountain of dirty dishes on
the kitchen counter.

Early the following morning Chuck called to thank
Gabby for the seder. Best Pesach he had been to since childhood.
She was in a hurry to depart for the synagogue, but he held her
back with a lancing question.

"Will Kye sit next to you at the
congregational seder tonight, Rabbi Gabby?"

"Is there something wrong with that? she
sounded testy.

"Nothing wrong with Kye. I like him. A
lot."

"Good. You're my official food taster when it
comes to men."

Chuck had a habit of being diplomatic and
opening a sore subject with a question rather than a declaration.
"Do you think this is a good time to introduce him to the
congregation?"

That needed an extra moment to deliberate.
"He'll create a stir whenever I present him. I've kept enough
secrets about my private life. It's always backfires on me."

"A Korean Baptist battling to keep a very
controversial web site alive while holding his creditors at bay in
bankruptcy court is a big pill to swallow. Don't expect universal
approval."

"They'll gossip if I were to bring Moses to
the seder. Kye and I are just friends. Don't read too much into
that."

"I'll try not to. But my instinct draws me in
another direction. A wise old Turk once said 'Beware impossible
relationships. They sneak up and catch you by surprise.'"

"I'll keep that in mind, friend. By the way,
what's your name in Turkish?"

Anticipating the congregational seder, the synagogue
buzzed with extraordinary activity. Sometime Sunday evening a
half-dozen heavy production trucks from Disney Productions
bivouacked in the parking lot in preparation for the live broadcast
the following day. Karla Foo had modified her original plan to air
the full reenactment first, followed by the seder at Ohav Shalom. A
week before airing, she decided on a more challenging technical
format – to run the historical and modern celebrations
intermittently, first offering an eight minute selection from the
Haggadah
at Ohav Shalom followed by a
flashback to the historic Sinai reenactment of equal length, then
repeating this sequence throughout the evening. This decision meant
re-writing the script, as well as coordinating with Gabby the
Haggadic portions.

After a brief
maariv,
morning
worship service, attended by a mere handful of the
most devout, Gabby retreated into her study to rehearse for the
evening's seder. Mindful that this was supposed to be an annual
celebration of an ancient ritual and not a television extravaganza,
she plugged into the script readings for Asa Folkman and
congregational officers, reminding herself that her role was to
conduct this event as if no cameras were present – a tall order
since it was necessary to schedule breaks for the historical
reenactment from Sinai and, of course, for television
commercials.

She was about to phone Sandra Jacoby's
parents to confirm that their nine-year-old son, Joshua, would be
called upon to recite the
Arbah Shelelot
–
Four Questions, in Hebrew – when
interrupted by a discreet rap on her study door. She rose to admit
the visitor and was pleased to find Cantor Reuben Blass, a short,
heavy-set man with a shock of silver hair on his temples and pasty
eyelids that she felt bore the full weight of Jewish suffering
throughout the ages. His taste in music bent toward the operatic
rather than the wailing supplications of traditional cantoral
hazanut
from Eastern Europe. Yet during
the
Musuf
service on Yom Kippur his
baritone voice, laced with affliction and misery, competed with the
best of the Orthodox cantors. Calculating that Gabby was usually
too occupied for matters of liturgy and music, Reuben seldom
visited her study, though she had often invited him. The Disney
script scheduled him to chant the holiday
kiddush
, then lead the congregation in three popular
Pesach
songs,
Dayenu,
Adir Hu
in Hebrew and
Haad-Gadya
in
the original Aramaic. Gabby offered a friendly handshake and
ushered him to the couch kitty-corner to her desk.

Once seated, he lifted a freckled, hirsute
hand and shook a CD disc in her direction. "Gabby, have you heard
this?"

The question caught her unprepared. "How
would I know? What's on it, Reuben?"

"Does Asa talk to you about his private
life?"

She thought immediately about his playing in
strip bars and conjured a vague reply. "He talks to me about some
things. Certainly not everything. What have I missed?"

"How about his music?"

She maintained the same degree of vagueness.
"Yes. A little."

"Have you heard his newest composition
A Jazzman's Prayer
?"

The title stirred her curiosity. "No, I
haven't. He's always composing new scores. The way he improvises I
can't keep up with his production. Is
A Jazzman's
Prayer
any good?"

Reuben waved the CD in a figure eight with
bold gestures. "No. It isn't any
good
,
Gabby."

"The Morgenstern affair has taken a terrible
toll on him. It must have an effect on his music, too."

"No. No, " Reuben became animated. "I didn't
mean that. What I meant was it isn't just good. It's positively
magnificent
. This isn't the music of a
hack composer with pretensions to following in Prokofiev's
footsteps, but a genius. Lots of us try writing scores and
sometimes we turn out a decent product. More often than not, we're
just mediocre, or inferior to that. But I'm telling you Asa's in a
different league. This CD was made by his friends from the
nightclub circuit who sent it around. It's a bit choppy in parts,
but the composition is off-the-wall fabulous. I hope I'm not
talking out of school, but Asa confided in me that he got a call
from the San Francisco Symphony Foundation. They want him to score
it for a full orchestra."

"Is he qualified to score for an orchestra? I
didn't know he was familiar with all those instruments," she
sounded her amazement.

Reuben arched his shoulders as if prepared to
sing. "If he can compose music like this, he can probably find
instruments to play it. Besides, he can hire a professional
arranger to help."

"You've got my attention but I can't listen
until sometime tomorrow after the seder. Can you leave the CD with
me? By the way, are you prepared for this evening?"

"Of course, but I'm nervous. This might be
the largest audience of my life. But I say to myself, how many
times have you sung
Adir Hu
? It isn't as
if I don't know the music. Besides, I intend to get everybody else
singing along with me."

"That's what I prefer; no operatics, please.
We don't want our part of this extravaganza to look like a
theatrical production. We win if we look exactly like what we are,
an urban American congregation celebrating its heritage. Nothing
more. We lose if we're discovered by Hollywood."

"Isn't that what happened when Disney
approached the congregation?" Reuben eyed her to reveal a playful
insight. "But I understand what you're saying. Just allow me a few
seconds of glory before the cameras. I promise not to ham it
up."

"Do what you think is appropriate, Reuben.
Your musical judgment is always superb. You've never disappointed
us. I can't wait to hear
A Jazzman's
Prayer
tonight."

By 4:30 p.m., Ohav Shalom was a madhouse. Troops of
Disney cameramen, stage lighting and sound specialists, script
readers along with their minions of
gofors
sortied from temporary synagogue command centers. They clashed
immediately with caterers who drew a cordon sanitaire around their
kitchen, prohibiting Disney employees even to fill water bottles
and wash their hands in the kitchen sinks. In Meyerhoff Hall,
tempers reached a boiling point. The caterers bristled when TV
people marched among fully-set banquet tables to facilitate
lighting for their backup cameras. When Gabby emerged from her
study to have a cosmetologist make up her face for better contrast
on camera, she heard angry voices and immediately detoured to
investigate.

Manufacturing calmness, she asked the Disney
technicians what they wished to achieve and what kept them from
their goal, then inquired of the caterers how facilitating the film
crew would detract from the food service. The clash centered around
nine tables laid out with glassware and dishes, floral centerpieces
and silverware.

Pressed for time, she affected a leisurely
demeanor, saying to the Disney representative, "These caterers, who
incidentally make food so delicious it's hard for me to make people
feel like they're coming out of Egyptian slavery, are short staffed
and under immense pressure. If you guys could spare a dozen of your
people for fifteen minutes to help move these tables, the job's
doable. If not, then you're going to have to live with what's
already here. Can you get that kind of help?"