Connie stared at me, nervously paying out stones onto Jake’s monument like someone who does not know the currency of the country in which she finds herself.
“Lobsters, Daddy?” she asked later, after our walking tours of the graveyard ceased and I’d started her in on her “Know Thy Lud” lessons. “May rabbis eat lobster?”
“Well,” I said, “I wasn’t always a rabbi. Was I?”
And it was a little, I thought, like giving up the past of a priest, always more mysterious, at least to me, than the known proscriptions of his circumscribed life, all that last-fling riot and disorder, the whirlwind sexual spree and rampage of his ladies’-man, precelibate years. Maybe it was melodramatic, but I’d felt a little like that back in the cemetery explaining Jake Heldshaft to Connie, mentioning Sachs and Haas and Stan Bloom and the others to her for the first time. Now, with my remark that I hadn’t always been a rabbi, and my gratuitous digs about her mom, it seemed to me that it was as if I’d told Connie she was adopted or suggested, boasting, some prepriestly, wild-oats past. It was a wrong footing, clumsy, almost drunken.
I’d felt rotten since the Kaddish at the Puffy Pisher’s graveside and had been trying to call Al Harry Richmond in Chicago. Al Harry was the sort who kept up. If anyone did, he’d know what happened. But when you’re a professional grief administrator like myself you’re always running into problems of measurement, issues of proportion. You have to give them their money’s worth over a eulogy, touch their hearts without breaking them, as one of the holy men back in the Maldives put it. Also, you never know how much anybody knows. It’s the beginning of politics. So when I finally reached Al Harry I was all bluff, hail-fellow congeniality and cautious, red-alert pussyfoot.
“Son of a gun,” I told him, “it’s a blessing from Eternal-Our-God just to hear your voice again. Your voice is a sight for sore eyes, Al Harry. It’s been way too long. Way too long. Remember the South Side? Remember the minyan? Remember old Wolfblock? Those were the days, hah? Carefree and gay. Not like today with all our responsibilities and what-with-one-thing-and-anothers. Say,” I said, “I’m something of a Wolfblock myself now. Our-God-and-God-of-Our-Fathers saw fit to make me a rabbi in Lud, New Jersey. Maybe you knew that. Well, the other day, the strangest thing. I was walking through this graveyard and I came across a marker for a Jacob Heldshaft. Remember Hebe Heldshaft, the Yiddish Mockeybird? Well, this one out here has a birth year that would be just about the same as Jake’s and I was wondering, well, do you think it could be the same fella? You hear any talk about He-Who-Is-Most-Merciful taking him out?”
“That’d be Jake all right,” he said. “Throat cancer.”
“Throat cancer? The thrush?”
“His falsetto did him in.”
And went on to tell me that Sachs, Haas and Marv Baskin were also history.
“What? No!”
Stan Bloom, who was still alive, he said, had been diagnosed as having a rare and dangerous blood disease. The trouble with people who keep up is just that. They get the bad news first. I felt awful. I was even a little jealous, if you want to know. I was the rabbi here, I was supposed to be the guy with the backstage access. Hearing all this gave me the same sense I sometimes get in Sal’s about how underemployed I am. Never mind that four of us were already out of the picture, never mind that Stan Bloom was apparently down for the count. Other things troubled me. I’d turned into this hick. Sowing my indifferent dead into the ground like a sort of truck farmer.
“Listen,” I told my old friend, “I’m glad we had this talk. Your news is terrible. It’s hard to take it all in. Jesus, Al Harry, the Jewish Nightingale was a falsetto? The Puffy Pisher wasn’t a natural soprano?”
“Heldshaft? He wasn’t even a natural tenor.”
“I’m going to pray for Stan Bloom’s blood count,” I told him.
“Sure,” he said.
“I’m going straight to Creator-of-the-World with this one.”
“Do what you have to.”
“I’m the Rabbi of Lud!”
“Kayn aynhoreh.”
“What, you think Gracious God is just going to stand by when He hears about this one? In the old days, in the minyan, in the old days He wouldn’t even let us catch a cold!”
“Tell Him.”
And I did. I dug out my phylacteries and prayer shawl and squeezed my eyes tight shut during an entire unmodified Shachris, conjuring God and praying and praying for the restoration of Stan Bloom’s blood. Though the image I had behind my boarded-up eyelids was the leather box blossoming from my forehead like the horn on a Jewish unicorn.
Because I was a little spooked myself now, just like my little girl, on the defensive in the upper reaches of the Garden State, hard by Pineoaks and Masada Plains, those big Jewish graveyards in the Jersey flats where Jake Heldshaft was buried and which death and Perpetual Care had made bloom like a desert in Israel. Hence the sociology, all the worked-up learning and high academics of my lessons, my scholarly observations on Lud and Judaism. Which I was actually preparing, writing down now, like Connie on a homework tear, rehearsing and delivering to the kid just as if, Lord save us, she were a living, breathing, fleshed-out, honest-to-God congregation instead of only just a by-blood, captive audience of one.
“Since coming to Lud,” I told her in my discourse upon Civilization and the Jews, “which, to be quite frank with you, Connie dear, has too many people under it not to be classified as a sort of Jewish death farm, I have had ample opportunity to observe our gentile, American neighbors. They’re handymen and artisans. They not only putter, these people, they flat-out build! And they do this with an ease that belies simple competence or skill. Now I put it to you that what’s happening here is that many of even the Yankee waspiest of our Christian friends are simply presenting — I use the word in its medical sense — not so much traditional values as racial traits and characteristics, the drives, I mean, of the peasant! And now I put it to you — I speak in my rabbi mode here — that most Jews don’t know their wrenches, are board-foot illiterates and are behind in their band saws. We’re often heavy smokers but generally nondrinkers, good husbands and loving, doting daddies who worship our kiddies. We leave them philosophy, talmudic quease and quibble, leave them, that is, history, culture and civilization. But for all that we practically invented the city, there are very few Jewish architects, and for all that a gemütlich notion of our families is the popular and conventional one, or that our drawing rooms frequently smell like comfortable old quilts or the fixings for soup, it’s the Wasp pop who’s loved. — And I’ll never understand how we ever got our reputation as a desert people!”
“I love you, Daddy,” Constance said.
“Then why are you so troubled?”
“I have no one to play with.”
This wasn’t, in the strictest sense, true.
As Lud’s only living child it would have been unusual if Connie weren’t at least a little spoiled. She could have had, had she wanted them (as once she did, on first-name terms with the gravediggers and, when she’d been small, Sal’s happy little helper, his assistant — I hadn’t known this — coffinside, bumping up bouffants, shaping corpses’ hairdos with her little hands and picking the odd thread from the burial clothes they lay in, smoothing the lapels of the men and punching up the big, puff sleeves on the women’s dresses, playing dolly with the dead), all the town’s day laborers at her beck and call, all its clerks, landscapers, stonecutters, morticians, and small shopkeepers.