Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet (17 page)

For about an hour he felt quite normal, and then the pressure came back again, he grimaced with the pain and surreptitiously put another tablet under his tongue. Once more he experienced relief, but he was aware that he was perspiring and he thought his face must be pale.

Normally, Marcus would have left around two, but he was sure his wife would note that he appeared ill and become alarmed. Out of her solicitude she would bedevil him with interminable questions – Did anything happen at the store? Did you have a fight with McLane? Was there trouble with a customer? Then, if he were to tell her about the letter, and sooner or later he’d have to, her woman’s logic would assume a connection with his present distress, he would be unable then to convince her that giving up the store did not matter to him. So he decided to remain in the store until dinner time, taking it easy, he would go to bed early, and he was sure that after a good night’s rest he would be all right in the morning. Of course, it was impossible for him to remain seated in the prescription room while there were customers out front, and in spite of his resolution he waited on trade almost as much as he normally would.

Once. McLane asked him. “You all right? You look sort of pale.”

“Sure, I’m all right,” he asserted. “Maybe it’s this new fluorescent tube. You look kind of pale yourself.”

Shortly after five, Dr. Cohen came in, and Aptaker went over to wait on him, the doctor looked at him narrowly, and as Marcus grimaced from a spasm of pain, Dan Cohen said. “Hey, what’s the matter?”

“Oh, just a little stomach upset, I guess. I feel like burping and I can’t seem to get it out.”

“You’re perspiring,” Cohen said.

“Yeah, maybe a little. It’s warm in here, and I’ve been running around.”

“How long have you had this upset?”

“Oh, just a little while.”

“He’s had it since lunch, Doctor,” McLane volunteered.

“Any pain in the arm?” Cohen asked.

“No.”

“Where do you feel it, Mark?”

“Right here,” and he touched his chest.

“Any trouble breathing? Is it a squeezing type of pain?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Let me have your wrist.”

“Aw now. Doctor. I know what you’re thinking. It’s nothing, I tell you.” But he held up a limp wrist.

The doctor felt the pulse and then said, “Look, take off your jacket and shirt while I get my stethoscope from the car.”

“I’m not going to take my shirt off in the store.”

“Why not? There’s nobody here now, we can go in the prescription room or the toilet. No, never mind. What you need is an EKG. Who’s your doctor?”

“I don’t have one.” Aptaker said. “I’m never sick.”

“All right then. I’ll drive you back to my office and I can do it there. Or better still. I could drive you to the hospital.”

“I’m not going to any hospital. Rose is expecting me home in about an hour.”

“Don’t be a damn fool.” Dr. Cohen said. “You might have to go home on a stretcher. Let me take you to the hospital.”

“Go ahead, Marcus,” McLane urged. “I’ll phone Rose for you.”

Aptaker hesitated, looking from one to the other, and read the urgency in the doctor’s face. “All right,” he said, “but I’ll talk to her. Just get the number for me.”

When she answered, he said, “Rose? I had a little stomach upset and Dr. Cohen happened to come by, he wants to give me a checkup.”

Later, during the evening visiting hours. Rose Aptaker sat by her husband’s bedside, he was in a hospital johnny, and his bed was raised so that he could face her without discomfort.

He explained how they would manage. “You can open in the morning, Rose, and McLane said he’d cooperate in any way necessary, he’ll come in around ten and –”

“No.” She shook her head in firm disagreement. “I’m calling Arnold to come home, he’ll take your place until you get back on your feet.”

“But he’s got a job.”

“So he’ll quit or take a leave of absence.”

“But if he won’t come?” Marcus asked. “He’ll come.”

Aptaker smiled wanly. “You know, Rose, this business –” he touched his breast – “it’s nothing serious, you understand. It’s a mild heart attack, and I feel fine, but it’s still a heart attack, and that means it will take some time, according to Cohen, it may be three months before I can go back to work.”

“Whatever time it takes, Arnold will stay; I can promise you. I know the boy. But maybe it would be a good idea if we called in a specialist, a heart man to –”

“No, no. If Cohen thought I needed one, he’d suggest it. I got faith in Cohen. I like the way he works. I feel he’s concerned about me.”

Chester Kaplan’s closest friend in Barnard’s Crossing was Al Muntz, even though the doctor was openly and argumentatively agnostic, they visited back and forth regularly, informal evenings in which the wives tended to talk together of clothes and cooking while the two men argued about the larger concerns of politics and religion.

Afterward, Kaplan might say to his wife, “I don’t know how a smart guy like Al Muntz can be so dumb about everything except his own little speciality. Did you hear what he said about my going to the temple every morning?”

And at the Muntz household, Mrs. Muntz might say, “Gee, Al, why do you always argue with Chet, and always about religion? I think he was hurt by what you said about his going to the minyan.”

“I said it because of what he said, he started it. If he says something that my common sense tells me is just plain superstitious nonsense, am I supposed to just sit there and say nothing?”

Tuesday evening, before they set out for their dinner data with the Kaplans. Mrs. Muntz adjured her husband, as she always did, not to spend the evening arguing about religion.

“Hell, religion is his bag, not mine. I don’t talk about it, he does.”

“Well, you don’t have to answer.”

“Sure. I’ll just sit there like a dummy and nod my head.”

And when they left their car and walked up the path to the front door, she reminded him, “Now, let’s keep it light and pleasant. Let’s have one evening without arguments.”

“All right, all right.”

And to be sure, all through dinner, under the watchful eye of his wife, Muntz resolutely refused every gambit offered by his host that might have led to argument. Even after dinner, when the women were in the kitchen loading the dishwasher, and Kaplan began to expatiate on the wondrous calm and peace of the weekend at the retreat, the doctor agreed that it certainly was nice up there. But, when encouraged, Kaplan went on to describe the positive physical benefits that some had experienced, the doctor could not help remark. “I’m willing to believe that Joe Gottlieb’s sinuses may have stopped bothering him – temporarily – but don’t try to tell me that God did it. Just don’t try.”

“I didn’t say it was God,” Kaplan said stiffly. “I merely said that he felt his head clear up right after the first period of meditation, and that it stayed clear all through the weekend.”

“So what? I bet it’s happened plenty of times, a lot of that is psychosomatic, and if you can kind of switch your mind off – Hell, it sometimes happens if you go to a movie or get absorbed in a book. But it doesn’t last. Or, if it does, then you develop some other symptom. If you’re trying to peddle this retreat as a cure for what ails you –”

“I am not trying to peddle anything,” said Kaplan. “I merely gave Joe Gottlieb as an example of the sort of thing that can happen when you succeed in shutting out the everyday world and concentrate on higher things, that’s essentially the meaning and the effect of the Sabbath.”

“So we’ve got the Sabbath, we’ve had it for a couple of thousand years. Why do you suddenly have to go off in the woods to celebrate it?”

“That’s just the point.” said Kaplan eagerly. “An institution that’s as old as the Sabbath tends to become just a matter of form, the substance evaporates. It’s the same with prayers, the people who wrote them, and maybe for some time after, they really prayed just as they honored the Sabbath, and maybe while Jews lived in the close-knit community of the ghetto, and their lives were hard, they were able to retain the initial enthusiasm for prayer and the Sabbath, to really feel their meaning. I know when my father spoke of the Sabbath in the old country his eyes would light up as though it was a wonderful experience he was remembering. But nowadays, we just go through the motions, the prayers don’t mean anything, and the Sabbath doesn’t mean anything, especially here in America. So they have just become rituals, and because they don’t mean anything, they don’t have any effect on our lives, that’s why it’s necessary to go off into the woods, to a new place, to start all over again to recapture their essence.”

“But why now, Chet? It was just as true ten years ago and twenty years ago.”

“Because it’s in the air, the young people sense it and show it in their dissatisfaction with the old ways, they are searching for something new, the time is ripe. You probably feel it too, but you won’t admit it to yourself. Tell me, why did you vote to buy the retreat, if deep down –”

“Hell. I voted for it because you presented it as a sort of package deal: sell the Goralsky property and buy this place up-country. I’m all in favor of selling the Goralsky property because I know that if the temple retained it, the place would just go downhill and be worth less next year than it is this year and even less the year after, an institution can’t manage commercial property, not even a bank can. Besides. Bill Safferstein was giving us a crazy price for it, maybe half again what it’s worth on the market today. So I’d be a fool not to vote to sell it, as for the place up in New Hampshire, I figured we were getting a pretty good deal on that, too, we might develop it into a sort of camp where members of the temple could go for a week or two in the summer, or even as a kids’ camp. But as far as anything else is concerned, don’t expect me to go along. My training has been scientific. I’ve got to have proof, hard, scientific, mathematical proof before I believe something.”

“How about your own colleague. Dan Cohen? He came. Now you’ve got to admit he’s had the same training you have. His attitude is as scientific as yours, isn’t it?”

“Well, I’m not so sure, he’s a G.P. Some of them get into all kinds of things. I’ve known some of them to give advice on family matters, even legal matters. But all right, let’s say he is strictly scientific in his thinking. What about Dan?”

“Have you talked to him?” Kaplan asked. “Since he went on the retreat. I mean?”

“As a matter of fact, no. I’ve been kind of busy the last few days, and we just didn’t happen to get together. Why, what did he say?”

“I saw him Sunday afternoon, and he was positively euphoric. When I asked him how he’d enjoyed the retreat, he grinned from ear to ear and said it was a tremendous experience, he felt it might have changed his whole life. How about that?”

“Well…”

“Go on,” Kaplan taunted him. “Go on and talk to him. You’ll see what he says.”

“Well, because a man has had scientific training doesn’t mean he’s going to be scientific all the time.” said Muntz lamely.

Rabbi Small saw Marcus Aptaker in the course of his regular pastoral visit to the hospital.

“How do you do. Rabbi. It’s nice of you to stop by,” Aptaker said politely.

“How are you feeling?” the rabbi asked gently as he drew a chair toward the bed.

Aptaker thawed a little. “All right, I guess, but kind of weak.”

“Was this something sudden, or had you been ailing for some time?”

Aptaker shook his head wearily. “I don’t know, maybe it was coming on and I didn’t realize it, they say it’s due to tension, well, I guess a man in business these days has plenty of tension, especially in the retail drug business where you don’t know when you open in the morning that some crazy hippy isn’t going to come in and take a shot at you. You learn to live with it, but I suppose it’s building up all the time. Of course, the letter I got from you people didn’t help any.”

“A letter from us?” the rabbi asked, puzzled. “You mean from the temple? What kind of a letter?”

“The letter from your board of directors. You’re a member, aren’t you?”

“I – I attend the meetings by invitation of the president. I’m not actually a member.”

“You mean you don’t vote?”

“Yes, when I’m present I vote, but –”

“Well, the letter said it was by unanimous vote of the board, so you must’ve voted for it.”

“Believe me, I know nothing about any letter sent you, Mr. aptaker. What did it say?”

“It said that you people couldn’t renew my lease on account you were selling the block.”

“I didn’t even know you had asked for a renewal of your lease.”

“Oh yes, Rabbi. See, when my lease was close to expiring, I wrote to Mr. Goralsky asking for a renewal. So he wrote back that I’d been a good tenant, and he was willing to give me a new lease on the same basis as the old one for five years and five years’ option and that he’d send out the lease forms for me to sign.”

“And he didn’t?”

“Oh, he sent them out all right,” said Marcus. “But there was this clause saying that I had to take out insurance for my plate glass, well, we’d crossed out that clause on previous leases, because I always took care of the plate glass myself. So I wrote him and asked he should cross out that clause.”

“And he refused?”

Aptaker shook his head grimly. “No, he died. I was going to write to his son, Ben, but then I got this notice from the lawyers saying the property had been willed to the temple, so I wrote to you people and I didn’t hear a word for weeks. It didn’t bother me, you understand, because where it’s an organization I figure there’s bound to be some delay, and besides, I had sent the temple a copy of Goralsky’s letter, then yesterday, I get an answer. It’s from Chester Kaplan – he’s your president, isn’t he? – and he says the property has been sold to William Safferstein and I should contact him.”

“And did you?” the rabbi asked.

“I only got it yesterday. Besides, what’s the use where he’s been after me to sell him my store?”

“Safferstein wants to buy your store?”