Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet (6 page)

“Who’s hiding anything? A beard is the natural thing; it’s shaving that’s unnatural.” It was as though the years had fallen away and they were back in high school where derisive sallies were the pattern for conversation.

“Just because it grows doesn’t mean you don’t have to cut it,” she said tartly. “How about toenails and fingernails? I always feel that a man with a beard is hiding something, either a weak chin or a scar, or an inferiority complex.”

“Well, I’m not. It’s – it’s religious.”

Then she noticed the yarmulke he was wearing. “Oh, you’re one of those.” She looked him up and down, taking in the boots, the patched jeans and the denim jacket. “The rest of you doesn’t look very religious.”

“Religion isn’t a matter of costume,” he said loftily. “Just of hats, eh?”

“That’s different. It’s a head covering, any hat will do, but this one shows that it’s for religion and not just to keep my head warm or the sun off it.”

“I see, well, I’ve got to see to Jackie. Come in, if you want to.”

“Well I –” but he followed her into the house and on into the kitchen, where Jackie sat at the table drinking a glass of milk. “Taste good, Jackie? You like milk?” he asked, making conversation.

The youngster nodded shyly and drained his glass as if to prove it.

“Now upstairs for your bath,” she said. Obediently, the boy rose from the table and started for the stairs. “Aren’t you going to say good-bye to the man?” she called after him.

He came back and went over to Akiva, he held out his hand again and said, “Good-bye.”

“Gee, you sure got him trained,” said Akiva admiringly.

“I do my best. Say, would you like some coffee? It’s all ready. I usually have it while Jackie is having his milk.” She brought two cups to the table along with a plate of cookies. “Go on, take one,” she urged. When he seemed reluctant, she smiled and said. “It’s all right, they’re kosher. I made them myself.”

“Oh yeah?” He reached for a cookie. “How come you keep a kosher kitchen?”

“Because it’s the way I was brought up.”

“So why did you find this funny?” he asked, touching the crocheted yarmulke on his head.

She grinned. “I wasn’t brought up that kosher.”

He grinned back at her, not in the least offended. “You been living here in town all along?” he asked.

“All except when I was at school.”

“Your husband local? Anybody I’d be apt to know? I mean, one of the guys at school?”

She poured the coffee. “He’s from Boston originally. Goldstein, Fred Goldstein. Know him?”

He shook his head.

“I was divorced last year,” she said easily.

He had been seeing her as he remembered her in high school. Now he looked at her appraisingly, she was not particularly good-looking, he decided, just short of being plain, in fact. But her face showed a self-possession and assurance that he found oddly attractive, she had a high forehead and widely spaced cheekbones, but her brown eyes were also widely spaced, so that the face was not disproportionate. It struck him that there was nothing feminine about her features except for the soft rounding of the jawline, ending in a firm chin, she stared back at him and he lowered his eyes.

“Gee, that must have been tough on you,” he said, “with the boy and all. I’m sorry.”

“It happens all the time,” she said with a shrug. “Half the girls I went to school with who got married are either divorced or separated, at least it seems that way. It’s the times. People don’t need each other anymore.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s the truth. Men used to marry because they needed a woman – to cook for them, to clean and mend for them, to have sex with. Nowadays, it’s no trouble to cook for themselves. You just have to heat something that you buy already cooked in a store, and no one mends anymore. You don’t have to. Who darns socks these days? And sex is pretty readily available, too. So why should a man get married?”

“How about women? They still need to, don’t they?”

She shook her head. “No more than men, they used to need a man to support them while they kept house. Now they can get jobs, and housekeeping is so simplified that they can cook and clean for themselves even with a nine-to-five job. When people needed each other, they tended to stay together. Nowadays they marry because they just want each other, and when they stop wanting, there’s no real reason to stay together, especially because when you stop wanting one person it’s usually that you’ve started to want another.”

“Is that what happened to you?” he asked.

She smiled sourly. “What do you think? He remarried as soon as the decree became final.”

“And the boy, does he miss his father?”

“Of course he does, but he’ll get over it. His father was away a lot on business, sometimes a week at a time, so it isn’t as though he was accustomed to seeing him here every day. Children are flexible. Or do you have children of your own?”

He shook his head. “I’m still single.” Then he laughed. “Up until eight or nine months ago when I came to Philadelphia I wasn’t in one place long enough to get married.”

“A hobo.”

“Yes I guess you could say so.”

“And what made you stop in Philadelphia?”

“That’s where I went to school. I stayed there because I came in contact with Reb Mendel’s chavurah.”

“And got religion.”

“I found what I’d been looking for,” he said simply. “I got an idea of the meaning of my life, a sense of purpose, a sense of destiny.”

She was pleased that he had not responded in kind to her sarcasm. Yet she could not resist another sally. “And now that you’ve found the meaning of life, you’ve come to spread the gospel here?”

“Oh no, I’m just a beginner with Reb Mendel. I wouldn’t presume to be an expert. I’m only here for a few days visiting my folks.”

They talked – of people they had known at school, and of what had happened to them; of her plans to get a teaching position next year “so I won’t be dependent on Fred for support”; of his life on the road before settling in Philadelphia and the various religious disciplines he had sampled before he met Reb Mendel’s chavurah. “You come to a new town and the quickest way to meet people is to go to one of these religious meetings.”

Then Jackie called from upstairs. “I’ve had my bath, Mommy.”

“I’ll be right up, dear.”

“I better be running along.” said Akiva.

“Oh, all right. It was nice talking to you.” She started for the stairs. “You don’t mind if –”

“I’ll find my way out.”

As he trudged along the beach to where his car was parked, Akiva thought about the visit, mildly disappointed that she had not suggested that he call her and yet relieved, too, he told himself there was no point in establishing any more ties in Barnard’s Crossing than he had to.

The noon broadcast had been almost entirely devoted to news of Hurricane Betsy, there were pictures of the havoc the storm had already caused along the Carolina shore and satellite photos of the eastern coast which indicated that southern New England would not entirely escape the storm. But no one was concerned, since it was not raining and the air, save for occasional gusts of wind, was balmy, and while there were now thick heavy clouds in the sky, the sun would occasionally peep through for a few minutes at a time, shooting golden shafts of light made visible by the dark clouds behind them.

In the early afternoon, the tide was unusually high, although not yet at peak, and cars lined the shore as people came to watch the majestic fury of the surf, at various points along the sea wall, where the land jutted out into the water, the surf was apt to be especially strong, and here young teen-agers gathered to brave the elements, as a big roller broke on the rocks and then receded, they would venture out to the very edge to challenge the next big wave, racing back to avoid the spray when it broke. Sometimes they waited too long, or the force of the wave was stronger than expected, and they would be drenched. while their more cautious friends jeered from a safe vantage point.

Jonathan, the rabbi’s five-year-old son, had been playing in the yard most of the afternoon. Now he came running into the house to relate that his friend next door had been taken to the nearby shore to watch the surf and that he wanted to go, too, he appealed to his mother, of course, and she suggested to her husband that he could do with a little fresh air after having spent the afternoon in his study. So the rabbi, with Jonathan’s hand firmly held against his ecstatic tugging, sauntered along the shore, stopping now and then to watch as a particularly big roller marched toward them to strike and disintegrate against the rocks.

The rabbi heard his name called, and looking around, he saw Akiva Rokeach waving to him, he waited for him to come up to them. “With the help of my wife,” he said, “I finally remembered, or rather figured out, who you are. You’re the druggist’s son, aren’t you? Mr. aptaker? It’s late in coming, but I want to thank you for what you did for us one night a few years back.”

Akiva smiled and shrugged.

Rabbi Small continued. “You can understand that I was pretty much confined to the house for the next day or two taking care of Jonathan here, but then I went down to the store to pay for the medicine and to thank you properly. But you were gone.”

Akiva grinned. “Yeah, the very next day as I remember it.”

“Nothing to do with what you did for us, I hope.”

“Oh no. My father asked me to, he gave me good marks for that*

“I see. So I gather you left because of a disagreement with your father.”

“You might call it that.” Akiva began to laugh. “Gee, you’re just like my rebbe. You guys are all alike, I guess. I say something, and from just one word, or maybe from the tone of my voice, he infers a whole book.”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to pry.”

“Oh, that’s all right. Rabbi, as a matter of fact. I had a hellova fight with my father and I left, and I wasn’t planning to come back.”

“But you have.”

“Just for a couple of days, and that was because Reb Mendel – that’s my rebbe – told me to.” He went on to describe Reb Mendel and the chavurah.

“You do everything he tells you?”

“I try to. I had a week’s vacation and I wanted to spend it at his house, he has this big ark of a house and his chasidim sometimes stay there for a few days for intensive study. But he told me to go home instead, to my parents. So I did.”

“Just like that.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that someone is directing your life, making your decisions for you?” the rabbi asked.

“No. Because he has the Insight, he can see clearer and further than I can. It’s like if a bunch of guys were wandering in the desert and they didn’t know which direction to go, and one had a telescope and said he could see a village due west. Wouldn’t they accept it and go in that direction?”

“I would probably ask if I might take a peek through the telescope,” the rabbi said dryly.

“All right, say he didn’t have a telescope, but he just had keener vision?”

“I’d want proof of it before I started walking,” said the rabbi, with a smile.

“Oh, I know, you regular rabbis always sneer at the rebbe, but –”

“We regular rabbis are presumed to be merely experts in the Law,” Rabbi Small interjected, “not miracle workers like a rebbe. My sermons are essentially explanations of the Law and our tradition. Nevertheless, if you had come to me as a friend and asked my advice, I, too, might have suggested this would be a good time to see your parents and make it up with them. But I would have suggested it as a friend, not directed you because I’m a rabbi, the decision would have been entirely yours.”

“But suppose you knew, knew absolutely?”

“No one knows absolutely. Mr. Rokeach. Your rebbe, you say, is a psychologist. In my experience this does not necessarily confer expertise in understanding the motives of men, only some skill in designing explanations of their behavior, which may or may not be true and which can’t be proved one way or another anyway. Your rebbe is probably a bright man and so has the insight that any intelligent man has, that’s all.”

“But if he’s right every time?”

“No, he’s not right every time. When he’s right, you’re likely to hear about it, and when he’s wrong, you are apt to attribute it to your own failings. Just as, if some unforeseen good comes of your visit here, you will attribute it to your rebbe’s ability to see into the future. If nothing much happens, you will probably believe you neglected to perform some mitzvah. If you complain to him, he may tell you to be patient, that just as a stone dropped in a pool causes ripples which radiate to the shore, so your coming here is the necessary beginning of a train of events that will ultimately redound to your advantage, and you will believe him, especially if something happens afterward that you can connect, however remotely, with your visit.”

“How about the evidence of my own feelings?” demanded Akiva. “How about the calm and certainty that I felt after I joined the chavurah and Reb Mendel? Before that I couldn’t make up my mind – what to do, where to go –”

“That’s the penalty of having a mind,” said the rabbi. “We all suffer from it in some degree, the lower animals who operate on instinct don’t have the problem, the impulse to do something automatically shuts off all other circuits, the myth of the donkey who starves to death because he finds himself equidistant from two equal bales of hay applies more properly to humans than to donkeys. It’s people, not animals, who want to be in two places at the same time, who want to do two things simultaneously, that’s normal, but sometimes it reaches the point where it paralyzes action and decision, and the result is frustration, mental distress, sometimes complete inability to function. When you assign responsibility for a portion of your decisions to someone else, as you do to your rebbe, it’s not surprising if the immediate effect is one of calm and relief. Some claim the same effect when they surrender their souls to Jesus, according to an acquaintance of mine who had been in the Jews for Jesus movement. Others invoke the Virgin Mary or a special saint, or the latest popular guru out of the East.”