“So what can we do about it now? We can’t take the body out.”
“Well-You know, if the widow wouldn’t object-”
“Forget it, Mort. Even if she were willing, and if I’m any judge of character she wouldn’t be, we’d have to get the approval of the Board of Health of Darbury where our cemetery is, and of the Board of Health of the place where he would be reburied. There’d be so much red tape and so much publicity-”
“Actually, it was Ben Goralsky’s idea, Marve. I told him all that.”
“So have you got any other ideas?”
“Well,” Schwarz began cautiously, “it stands to reason this must happen fairly often, especially where we bury them as soon as we can. Then a couple of days later they find a note, and what they thought was a normal death now is a suicide. So I figure there must be some machinery for taking care of this kind of thing. Some ceremony of purification, say, that the rabbi can perform that would make the cemetery kosher again. The rabbi could dress it up, put on a real show-What’s the matter?” as Marvin shook his head slowly.
“I don’t think the rabbi would do it.”
“Dammit, if the Board orders him to, he’ll have to.”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure that’s something the Board can order. It seems to me it would be up to the rabbi to decide. And I’ll tell you something else: I’m not so sure I like the idea myself.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t think it would do the cemetery any good.”
“Now what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Look, Mort, you’re an architect so maybe you don’t understand the psychology of selling. It’s hard enough to sell someone a cemetery lot-it’s what we call an intangible, like insurance. The people in our congregation are all pretty young. Their minds aren’t running to things like cemetery lots. But a good salesman can convince them. Sometimes, he appeals to their sense of loyalty to the temple; sometimes to their sense of responsibility to their wives and families. Sometimes you just shame them into it. But whatever your approach, you’ve got to make sure your product is perfect, without a flaw. The minute there’s something wrong with your product and your prospect knows it, he grabs onto it and uses it against you. If we let on there is something wrong with the cemetery, that maybe it isn’t a hundred percent kosher, I figure three quarters of those people I’ve got lined up right now I can kiss them goodby.”
“So they’ll buy a little later-”
“Mort, you talk as though you didn’t realize what the cemetery can do for a congregation. Remember, the temple bought the land last year when Becker was president. And whatever you say against Becker, remember he was a businessman. He made me chairman of the committee because he figured that a guy who could sell insurance could sell cemetery lots. Like I say, they’re both intangibles. He used to kid me about it. ‘Marve,’ he used to say, ‘you sell them insurance which is like betting them that they’re going to live, and they’re betting they won’t. So when you sell them a lot, you’re hedging your bets. Son of a gun, you got them coming and going.’ And I’ve used that on some of my prospects-it kind of makes a joke of it.”
“I’ll admit you’re good, Marve. That’s why I kept you on as chairman when I was making up my committees. So what are you getting at?”
“All I’m saying,” said Marvin doggedly, “is you should appreciate what the cemetery can mean to the congregation.”
“But if we don’t do something right now, we stand to lose the Goralskys.”
Marvin was not impressed. “I’ll admit it’s nice to have a first-class tycoon type like Ben Goralsky associated with the temple, but not if we have to kowtow to him every time he-”
“Look Marvin, if I tell you something, can you keep it under your hat? Suppose I said I practically have an ironclad promise from the old man, Ben’s father, that he will ante up the money for a new chapel-not just a big donation, but the whole cost, maybe a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
Marvin whistled. “A hundred and fifty grand!”
“Maybe more.”
Marvin drew a pencil from his pocket. “Then in that case, I may just have an idea,” he said. He fished around and brought forth from an inside pocket an advertising folder, which he discarded in annoyance.
“What are you looking for? Paper?” Schwarz slid a pad over to him.
“Thanks.” He drew a rough square and in the bottom righthand corner made a small x. “This is the cemetery and here is where Hirsh is buried. All right. According to Goralsky, a suicide is supposed to be buried in a corner off to one side. So we make a corner.” He drew an oval inside the perimeter of the square. It enclosed the entire area except for the four corners. “By building a circular road inside the cemetery, that leaves Hirsh’s grave outside-and in a corner. What do you think?”
Schwarz looked at the drawing in amazement. “Marvin, you’re a genius! You just thought that up?”
“Well, I’ve been playing with the idea in another connection. You remember a couple of Board meetings ago I said we had to have a road through the cemetery. The Board turned it down because they didn’t want to go into that kind of money at the time. But I thought about it a lot, trying to figure out a pattern that would give access to all parts of the cemetery and still eat up the least possible land. This seemed to fill the bill.”
“But isn’t a circular road apt to be more expensive?”
“We don’t have to do the whole road. Even keeping to our present budget-the money already voted that I have in hand-we can lay it out and do just one corner, Hirsh’s corner to start with. We’ll finish the rest when the Board votes more money.”
“By God, Marve, I think that’ll do it. I still say you’re a genius.”
Marvin looked dubious. “How about the rabbi?”
“What about him?”
“Do we tell him?”
Schwarz considered. “I guess we better, if only to make sure this will do the trick.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Surely you must be joking,” exclaimed the rabbi. “You’re harking back to the Dark Ages. During the Nazi Terror, there must have been hundreds of suicides. Would you have denied them ritual burial?”
“But you yourself threatened old man Goralsky with just that, according to his son,” said Schwarz.
“Threatened him? I was scaring an adult with the bogeyman. He could tell I wasn’t really serious. I was just trying to get him to take his medicine. I told you all about it at the temple.”
“Yes, but Ben Goralsky evidently took it seriously,” said Schwarz.
“I doubt if he did at the time,” said the rabbi. “But in any case, on what grounds can you assume Hirsh was a suicide? The police verdict was accidental death. And I went to the trouble of discussing it personally with the chief of police, and he feels the evidence overwhelmingly favors that finding. Are we to be more callous in our dealings with the dead and bereaved than the civil authorities?”
“Suppose it finally was decided that he was a suicide?” asked Marvin.
“Decided by whom?”
“Well, by a court of law.”
“Even then, the chances are that he was either temporarily insane or suffering from a compulsion so extreme he was powerless to withstand it. So he wouldn’t be accounted a suicide in the eyes of Jewish Law.”
“Yes, but if he was a suicide, just suppose he was,” Marvin persisted. “Then wouldn’t it be up to us or to you to do something about it?”
“Why would anything have to be done about it? He was buried-that in itself is a cleansing action. ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.’ Burial itself cleanses. When a utensil becomes tref, the way you cleanse it is to bury it in the earth. Are you suggesting that the presence of this man’s body pollutes God’s earth? And if so, where does it stop? At the boundary of our cemetery, which is an artificial line recorded in the Registry of Deeds, or does it go on indefinitely until it reaches the ocean?”