Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet (24 page)

“You mean here in this house?”

“No, I mean where you are, wherever you happen to be.”

Rose Aptaker wondered, of course, but after her experience the last time he came home, she was careful not to question him, he might resent it as an invasion of his privacy.

She did question him, however, when she saw him reciting his prayers in the morning. “Don’t you go to the minyan in the temple anymore?”

“Well, in the morning I’d rather have the extra sleep and in the evening I’m usually at the store.” His real reason was that Leah’s father was sure to be there, and he was embarrassed at seeing the father while he was intimate with the daughter.

Akiva did not discuss the future with Leah, what his plans were or her place in them. But after the first week, he said with disarming casualness. “I told my mother about us.”

“Oh? And what did she say?”

“She wanted to know if you were a nice girl, what she would call a nice girl.”

“And what did you say?”

He grinned. “I told her you were a slut who had got her hooks into me and was pressing me to marry her and that I couldn’t see any way out.”

“M-hm. Did you tell her about Jackie?” Leah asked.

“I did, she was naturally ecstatic at this proof of your fertility –”

“Seriously,” she pleaded.

Akiva sobered immediately. “All right, seriously then. My mother didn’t actually throw a fit, probably because she’s so involved with my father right now, but she was – er –”

“Upset? Disappointed?”

“All of that and then some,” Akiva said.

“Because of Jackie?”

“And your being divorced didn’t help any. You’ve got to understand, Leah, that –”

“Oh, I understand,” she said bitterly. “My mother would react the same way if the situation were reversed.”

“Well, she’ll get over it,” Akiva said philosophically.

“Will she?”

“Of course she will, she’ll have to.”

“Maybe if you had waited.” Leah suggested. “It’s been such a short time.”

“You wait until you’re sure. I’m sure now, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but.., are you going to tell your father?” she asked.

“My mother will probably tell him,” he said, smiling faintly. “She was on her way to the hospital when I sprang it on her, maybe the old man will take it better.”

It was Marcus Aptaker’s first day out of bed. It was demonstrable progress, and he was naturally euphoric.

“Oh, you’re sitting up, Marcus,” Rose greeted him. “Did the doctor say you could?”

“For meals and a little while afterward,” he said with smug satisfaction. “Tomorrow for a little longer, and in a couple of days I’ll be allowed to walk around the bed. I could be out of here in a week, but of course I’ll be confined to the house for a while.”

“That’s nice, Marcus.”

Her reaction seemed to lack the warmth and enthusiasm he expected. In fact, as he studied her, she appeared unusually subdued. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

“Wrong? Of course not.”

“Tell me, Rose. What’s happened? Did something happen at the store?”

“That’s all you ever think of is the store.”

“Then there is something wrong, Arnold?”

She could not contain herself any longer. “Oh Marcus, he’s seeing a girl,” she announced tragically.

“So?”

“But it’s serious, he wants to get married.”

“Well, that’s normal, he’s twenty-eight. It’s time he got married, maybe the responsibility will settle him.”

“Oh, it will settle him all right,” she said bitterly. “She has a child, a five-year-old boy.”

“A widow?” he asked cautiously. “Worse, Marcus. Divorced!”

“I see, an older woman maybe?”

“No,” she admitted. “She must be Arnold’s age, she went to high school with him.”

“So she’s from Barnard’s Crossing. Do we know her?” he asked.

She delivered the clincher. “She’s Kaplan’s daughter.”

“Kaplan?”

“The president of the temple who wrote you the letter.”

“Then at least we know she’s from a good family,” he said reasonably. “I don’t know him personally, but the chances are they wouldn’t make a man president of a synagogue if he weren’t a decent person.”

“It doesn’t bother you? Here you’re in the hospital because of him, and it doesn’t bother you that your son wants to marry his daughter?”

“You’d like me to be bothered. Rose?” he asked quizzically. “He wrote the letter because the board of directors voted it. I’m sure it was nothing personal. How could it be when he doesn’t even know me?”

“And that the girl is divorced and has a son?” she persisted, he shook his head sadly. “It’s not like it used to be, Rose.

Nowadays, it doesn’t mean anything. Half the marriages end in divorce. Your own sister’s daughter got divorced, and she has two kids.”

“But she’s a nice girl and her husband was impossible.”

“So maybe this girl is a nice girl, and maybe her husband was impossible.”

“If she were a nice girl, she wouldn’t agree to marry him after just a week.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “That’s the way young people are these days. Once they make up their minds, they go ahead. Who knows? Maybe it’s better that way. Your niece went around for over a year before she even announced her engagement, and then after the two kids, she decided he was impossible. So you can make a mistake even if you wait.”

“But –”

“When Arnold comes here tonight, I’ll talk to him,” her husband said. “I’ll ask him about the girl, about her child, what his plans are. If I like what I hear, I’ll try to help him.”

“What do you mean you’ll help him?”

“If he’s serious, if he wants to settle down. I’ll work out some arrangement for him to take over the store.”

Chief Lanigan’s problem of how to meet with Ross McLane was settled by a rookie patrolman, the newest recruit to the force. It was the young officer’s first day in uniform, and he was burning with zeal for law and order, when he spotted McLane’s car parked outside the drugstore and issued a parking ticket. McLane came rampaging into the police station later that afternoon and shook the ticket under Chief Lanigan’s nose. “Now look here. Chief. I always put my car in the parking lot, but some salesman took my usual place, and when he pulled out I was busy in the store and I didn’t have a chance to move it.”

Lanigan took the ticket, noted the officer’s name on the bottom and smiled. “Come on in, and we’ll talk about it.” He turned and led the way to his office. When they were seated, the chief explained, “It’s a new man, and naturally he’s conscientious, actually, we haven’t issued a ticket in that area for months. Normally, we don’t except during the summer months when traffic is heavy there and cars go scooting by at high speed.”

“Well, how about this ticket?” McLane demanded.

“Oh, I guess we can arrange so you won’t have to pay the two bucks. Tell me, what do you hear of Marcus? How’s he getting along?”

“All right. I was up to see him the other day and he was out of bed and sitting in an armchair. Looked pretty good, too.”

“That’s fine. How are you managing at the store?”

“Not bad now that Arnold is here,” McLane said. “I’m working the same hours I did when Marcus was there. But that first week, when I was all alone, it was murder. I’d get to the store at nine and work till ten at night. Of course, Mrs. aptaker would open, and lots of times it wasn’t too busy and I’d go out and take a breather for fifteen, twenty minutes, but –”

“Marcus was lucky he had you there. Lots of men wouldn’t have stood it,” said Lanigan.

“Well, I tell you, Mark is decent. When I lost my store, he offered me a job right away, there was a lot of talk around that I’d been hitting the bottle, but he had confidence in me, and I appreciated it.”

“And were you?”

“Was I what?” asked McLane.

“Were you hitting the bottle?”

“Hell, no. Look. I’d take a drink every now and then same as anybody else. When I lost my – when my wife passed away, I’d stop at the tavern around the corner because – well, because I was going home to an empty house, maybe that’s how the story got started, but all I had was one or at the most, two, and I wasn’t hiding it. I didn’t take a bottle to bed with me. Just a drink at the local bar.”

Lanigan shrugged. “What difference does it make how much you actually drink? If your customers think you’re a lush and stop coming in, then you were drinking too much even if you only took a nip once in a blue moon. It lost you your store, didn’t it?”

“No such thing. I lost my store because I was pushed to the wall.”

“Aw cummon.”

“It’s the truth. Chief. You know that guy Kestler, the old geezer that died recently, he had a chattel mortgage on my store and he called it. If he’d given me some time. I could’ve worked it off. But no, he wanted that store because he had a chance to sell it at a good price.”

“So Kestler called your mortgage?” Lanigan smiled. “I guess you didn’t feel too bad when he passed on then.”

“You want to know something funny? He got a prescription filled with us the very night he died. Dr. Cohen, Dan Cohen, he called it in and I took it on the phone. When I heard it was for Kestler, I thought I’d see him in hell before I’d fill out a prescription for him. But do you want to know something? When I heard he was dead. I felt sorry for the old bugger.”

“But you did fill it out, didn’t you?” asked Lanigan easily.

“I did like hell. I gave it to young Aptaker and told him to do it, as a matter of fact, I was working on one that a guy was waiting for, and he’d volunteered to deliver the Kestler prescription, so –”

“Young Aptaker? Marcus?”

“Hell no, he’s older than I am. I mean Arnold.”

“But I thought Arnold came to work just last week.”

“That’s right, but he was up here visiting that day, we were busy as hell on account of the storm, and he came in to lend a hand with the prescriptions.”

“You mean he worked just that night?” the chief asked.

“Uh-huh, he came in like he owned the place, he goes right to the prescription room in the back and says, ‘I’m Arnold Aptaker. I’ll give you a hand.’ I looked at Marcus, who was out front, but he just smiled kind of proud and didn’t say a word. So I started to show him around, you know, how the place was organized. But these young guys, you can’t tell them anything, he says. ‘I know, I know,’ so I let him fumble around and by God first thing I know he knocks over a bottle of cough syrup, and then starts to clean it up with paper towels, that stuff is sticky, well, anyone else I would’ve blown my stack, but this was Mark’s son, he was so pleased and proud to have him there, I didn’t say a word but just got the mop and cleaned up, after that Arnold settled down and was a real help with the pile of prescriptions we had, and we finished a lot earlier than I thought we would. I was hoping he’d stay on, because it’s a little heavy for two pharmacists, but the next day Mark said he’d gone to Philadelphia.”

“But now he’s back for good?”

“I guess he plans to stay until his daddy gets back on his feet. I don’t know if he’ll stay after that. You know how these young fellows are.” He glanced at his watch. “Hey, I got to get back, we start to get busy now, about that ticket –”

“Don’t worry,” said Lanigan affably. “I’ll take care of it.”

It was her mother Leah told, because her father was not home and she couldn’t wait for him or keep it in any longer. “His name is Akiva –”

“Akiva? Spanish?”

“No, Akiva is his first name. You know, after the famous Rabbi Akiva, the one who –”

“Then his folks must be terribly religious,” said Edie.

“I haven’t met them yet, but I understand they’re not. You see, it’s his own name. I mean, he chose it for himself.” Leah finally got the story told, editing it a little along the way. How she had met Akiva quite accidentally when he brought Jackie across the road from the beach and it turned out she knew him “because he used to come from around here.” How he had come back that night because of the terrible storm and his concern for their safety – hers and Jackie’s. “He had this long beard and I joked about it and told him I didn’t like it.” And then how she had not heard from him for days “and I assumed it was one of those things” and then how he had suddenly appeared again and he had shaved his beard off, and how they had been seeing each other every night and how much he liked Jackie and Jackie liked him.

“But what does he do? How does he make a living?” her mother asked.

“Oh, I thought I mentioned it, he’s a pharmacist, working for his father.”

“You’ve got to be practical about these things, Leah,” said her mother gently. “I mean where he’s only a pharmacist working in a drugstore –”

“But that’s what’s so wonderful about it. When he told his folks about us, his father offered him the store as a kind of wedding present. You see, he had this heart attack – his father did, I mean – and he’s supposed to take it easy. So he’ll work for Akiva –”

“Where is this store?” asked Mrs. Kaplan, her voice suddenly very quiet.

“Why, it’s right here in town, over by the Salem line. I’m sure you know it. It’s one of the oldest stores in the area.”

“Town-Line Drugs? Marcus Aptaker’s store?”

“That’s right, and Akiva is Arnold Aptaker.”

Chester Kaplan arrived home shortly after Leah had left, he was overjoyed at the news.

“So what do you intend to do?” asked Mrs. Kaplan.

He rubbed his hands gleefully. “Do? What’s to do? We’ll invite the young man to dinner, and a week or so later, we’ll invite his folks, then I suppose they’ll invite us –”

“You forget his father is in the hospital.”

“That’s right,” he said. “So we’ll invite Mrs. aptaker, and maybe we can go visit him in the hospital.”

“And what if she should refuse to come?” Edie asked. “Why should she refuse? We’re not good enough for her?”

“Because if it was me, I’d refuse,” his wife replied. “I’d feel that where you were pushing my husband out of business and maybe gave him a heart attack on account of it, I wouldn’t want to eat at your house. I’d feel the food would choke me.”

“Igave him a heart attack? Because we sold the block and I told him to apply to the new owner for a renewal of his lease? And when I file suit against somebody and he gets a heart attack, it’s my fault?”