“Is he joining us?” Jerry Rector wanted to know.
“That’s very kind,” the commissioner told Hamilton Edgar, “but I guess I’ll take a rain check. My compliments to… the guest of honor.”
“That might be you,” Hamilton Edgar said levelly, all traces of his moist hilarity gone.
“You told him guest of honor?” Dan said. “Guest of honor?”
“Come on, fellows,” Jerry Rector prompted, “let’s get going. It isn’t as if we had all the time in the world.”
Gently, the commissioner withdrew his arm. “Please,” he said, “let’s have a little separation of church and state here.”
Jerry Rector laughed.
“Hey,” Druff said. “Israeli lobby or no Israeli lobby, Bobbo Druff wears no man’s beanie. There ain’t an ecumenical ounce in my entire body.”
“Yeah,” Dan said, “we respect that in you.”
There wasn’t, he thought. (Who couldn’t really have been thinking. Their high must be contagious.) That ounce of the ecumenical. Or of the ethnic, either. Not for Druff scamorza, lox, green beer. All the holies and high masses, kissing this one’s prayer shawl and that one’s ring. If these Jews had his sawhorses in their pockets, they must have gotten them as out-and-out gifts, his perfectly civic charity, his skimmed, no-strings, up-front influence. (In this way he must, over the course of a year, have saved a week, a week and a half of his precious time. Just yesterday, who was it Dick told him had died? Marvin Macklin? He’d already dictated the condolence letter. What had it taken him, ten minutes, fifteen? And the family had gotten a letter out of it. Signed by the commissioner on his office’s official stationery. If he’d gone to the chapel or called on the family at home he could have been tied up for hours. And who, in all that grief and distraction, would even remember he’d come? No, a letter was better. The solace that kept on giving. The separation of church and state wasn’t just sound public policy, it was good business.) So spare him the lunch invitations, please. Though there were lunch invitations and lunch invitations. He was, he had to admit, drawn to these guys. There was something about them. They seemed very yar guys. Even old Ham Edgar, whose first impression on the commissioner, let’s be frank, hadn’t exactly been a good one. Druff thought: I believe I thought he was a bagman. And he was hungry. (Denied his All-Bran, his fresh-squeezed oranges, the pancakes and maple syrup of his just desserts. Nothing to show for his quarrels all day but toast and a cup of coffee on his belly. He could almost smell it, his hosts’ catered goodies — the fruits out of season, their mignon, fresh veggies and wine.) And, well, he was in the mood. (High, anyway, peckish and primed by his special Andean mouth appetizers.) And they seemed like folks from whom it was possible to learn a thing or two. If only they didn’t stick him at the head table with the heavy-duty relatives, the parents and grandparents, the bar mitzvah kid, his brothers and sisses. (Although no one, come to think of it, had actually ever said bar mitzvah. For all Druff knew it could have been a wedding going on in there.) He’d mention his head-table aversions, make it the condition of his attendance.
Dan slapped his temple with an open hand. “You told him there was a head table?”
Even Druff had to laugh.
Even when Ham ‘n’ Eggs said, “I told him fucking nothing. He’s out of the loop.”
“Hey don’t,” Jerry Rector said. “Talk like that’s a lot of hooey.”
Druff understood that Rector couldn’t really speak the language, that he dropped his few measly words into the conversation like a tourist, like someone who knows how to ask the time, say, or directions to the toilet in French. It was the screwball vocabulary of a screwball. Yet he could not rid himself of the notion — he couldn’t account for this — that these men were sympathetic, that running into them like this was a boon, some omen of endowment, vaguely — they were at a place of worship — heaven-sent. Druff, tossed and turned in his sleep, drugged as a schoolboy on the glamour of a Margaret Glorio whose magical availability had been the cause of his ablutions, his grand investiture, suddenly saw his weekend salvaged. He could talk to them. They would get down.
And found himself leading the way, onwarding up the synagogue steps like a Christian soldier.
Not, now he’d taken things into his own hands, so much hurt by their cries—“Hey, hey man, where you going?”—as instantly aware of several sudden, even conflicting urgencies — to call Margaret, to do something about Rose Helen’s batteries, to pee, to come to terms with his understanding new pals. Leaving them behind, beneath him on the sidewalk, calling out and waving like people farewelling passengers on steamships in one of Rector’s screwball comedies. Wondering why they were calling him off and, to win them over, to show his good nature and, turning to face them, and not for the first time, turned the tables, welcoming them, signaling them aboard, urging in semaphore that they join him before the synagogue sailed.
“Come up, come up,” he called down.
And pushing open one of the temple’s big doors let himself into a vacant lobby.
“Gee,” Druff said, “where’s—?”
“All gone,” said Ham ‘n’ Eggs.
“Split,” said Dan.
“Where’s that darn old poop think he’s going?” Jerry Rector muttered.
But Druff, too, had seen some movies, and was at once put in mind of an old one, a classic, a goodie. Cary Grant was a legionnaire. He’d stumbled onto a cave, a great, mysterious space. There’d been chanting, wicked prayers sent into the interior of the earth by savage assassins, cultists’ blood commitments, the dark, assured fanaticism of an immense pep rally, evil, awful. There was to have been, the commissioner sort of remembered, a virgin sacrificed, a white woman. The daughter of the regiment? Cary’s own sweetie? And what had put him in mind — this in the few seconds left to him (a moment like a fragment of precious time one speaker yields to another in a debate) before the others caught up with him — was the sudden, unexpected silence of the big empty lobby. (If “lobby“—he wasn’t sure — was what you called these bits and pieces of religious architecture, not “nave” or “narthex,” not “sanctuary” or “baptistery.” Not, he meant, its working, moving parts.) Wondering because — the doors were open — no one was in the sanctuary. Surprised by the absence of excited children, running, chasing one another in the halls, the sprung shirttails of the boys and collapsed stockings of the little girls, all the loose asthmas and hysterical else- wheres of their unruly attention. (He flashed abruptly on wild Mikey, on his ancient, disorderly holiday encounters with his fleeing cousins. He could have wept, Druff. He remembered wanting to kill the snob assholes, their under-control, son-of-a-bitch parents.)
“Excuse me,” Druff addressed the three spacey Jews, “but isn’t Saturday your day of worship?”
“Is that a crack?” Jerry Rector demanded.
“Jerry, please Jerry,” Hamilton Edgar was saying. “Commissioner here is a trained politician, a pro. A pro’s pro, even. Would such a man pass gratuitous anti-Semitic remarks if he didn’t have to?”
“Wait a minute,” Druff said, “I meant I thought it was a day of holy observation. That you set it aside for—‘services’ do you call them?”
“Services, that’s right,” said Rector, upset. “That’s what we call them, all right. That’s just what we call them. Who wants to know?”
“Well, no one wants to know,” said the City Commissioner of Streets. “I’m here,” he said, pointing to Dan, pointing to Ham ‘n’ Eggs, who’d extended his open wallet to his friend like a submission signal in nature, “as their guest. I come in good faith. No one wants to know,” he repeated. “All I meant is, where’s the festivities? Where is everybody?”