“Oh, Connie,” raising the window in the rec room where they’d been rehearsing, I called out sweetly, “Connie darling.” She was out front, risking the funeral corteges, which were the street’s only traffic, rather than play in our backyard that looked out on Lud’s biggest cemetery, gravestones floating on the level, becalmed surface of its unleavened earth like buoys. She was biting her nails, mauling her fingers with her mouth, drifting from station wagon to station wagon, aimless as a kid with a collection can at a red light.
“Connie,” I called, “shouldn’t we be doing Stan Bloom now? Come inside, sweetheart, and we’ll get to him while we’re both still fresh.” As I’d promised Al Harry, I’d been praying for Stan Bloom’s blood count, getting up Stan’s prayers with my daughter like a kind of 4-H project. “Come on, darling, you’ll play afterwards.” I lowered the window again. “I’ve this very dear friend in Chicago,” I told the ladies. “Connie and I have been praying for him.”
“A rare blood disease. He was on his last legs,” Shelley chipped in. “But Jerry thinks he may have caught it in time.”
They trembled, I tell you, shuddered. A small seizure. The chill of awe. Because people believe in intervention, in salvation and influence like a fixed ticket.
Connie lumbered in, the little girl all bulked up in her resentment as if it were a kind of steroid.
“Go wash,” I murmured.
“Ahh,” quivered Elaine Iglauer, Sylvia Simon and Joan Cohen together.
“Excuse me,” I told them, “I really ought to brush my teeth first.”
“Hmn,” vibrated Miriam Perloff, Rose Pickler and Fanny Tupperman.
When I came back I was wearing my yarmulke, I was wearing my tallith.
“Should we leave?” Naomi Shore asked.
“Not me,” Shelley said.
“That’s all right,” I said. “We’ll be in my study. Connie?”
“Here I am, Dad.”
I began with a couple of broches, laid on a Sh’ma, then, before they knew what had hit them — I could hear their attention through the thin walls — I was into my theme.
“Teller God of Collections and Disbursements, of Bottom Lines and Last Dipensations,” I prayed, “Lord, I mean, of Now-You-See-’em-Now-You-Don’t — Your servant, Jerry Goldkorn here with his lovely daughter, Constance.”
“Da-ad,” Connie bleated.
“—his lovely daughter, Constance.”
“Dad!” she scolded.
“Jerry Goldkorn here. Beseeching You from his hideaway in Jersey, Jersey Jerry Goldkorn. With my daughter at my side — the lovely Connie. As if,” I continued, “You didn’t know. Who knows everything. Eh, Old Sparrow Counter? Where we’re coming from. Why we’re here. You know what we’re up to. I don’t have to tell You!
“It’s Stan Bloom’s blood count again. Back in Chicago. In the Kaplan Pavilion. A young man. In his early fifties. With a lymphocyte count of a hundred and fifty thousand bleaching his blood. To only seven or eight grams hemoglobin. Is this a way to do a young fellow? Fix my old pal’s ratios, Lord. Bring that white smear down where it’s manageable. Down to ten, fifteen thousand. Beef up his red count to acceptable levels — twelve, fourteen grams.
“We have not yet forgotten Hebe Heldshaft, the Yiddish Mockeybird, whose falsetto prayers raised up a melanoma on his vocal cords like a welt to Your glory. Or those other good lads from the minyan — Norm Sachs, Ray Haas, Marv Baskin.
“Do what You can, would You? Grant our prayer. Oh, by the way, this happens to be a challenge grant. The kid’s faith is riding on it.
“Have you something to add, darlin’? Is there anything you’d like to say?”
“No,” she said.
“Connie joins me in the Amen.”
I could feel the frissons through the walls.
They so admire a rascal, other people’s cynicism. I was their rascal of God. Only Constance did not admire me. Though I was doing this for her. Getting His attention for her. Only for her. I wasn’t showing off for the women anymore. Not for Joan Cohen with all her wardrobe or Elaine Iglauer and her trade-up heart. Not for Naomi or Rose with their easy Valentine acquiescence. Or any other of those predisposed ladies, choir girls, songstresses for God. Not even for Shelley. (Though ultimately, I think, nearly everything I do is for Shelley.)
For Connie. Needing to impress Connie. Because I meant it when I said the blood count prayers were a challenge, that my kid’s faith was riding on them. Even if what I really meant was her faith in me. (Though inevitably, down the road, this conversation — RABBI OF LUD: “Hey, kid, I gave it my best shot. You were right there beside me, you heard me. Weren’t you? Didn’t you hear me? The lengths I went to. All wheedle one minute, all smart-ass, up-front I/Thou confrontationals the next. Jesus, kid, I’m a licensed, documented rabbi. I was taking my life in my hands there.” CONNIE: “He died? Stan Bloom died?” RABBI OF LUD: “I think prayer must be like any other treatment. I think the earlier you start, the more effective it is. Al Harry didn’t even tell us about Stan until he was already down for the count.” CONNIE: “He died, Daddy? You said you could pray him back to health and — Oh, Daddy, ‘down for the count’! I get it. Oh, that’s so grisly!”)
Am I a buffoon? Some wise-guy, ungood Jew? Understand my passions then. All my if-this-will-go-here-maybe-that-will-go-there arrangements were in their service. What did I want? What did I need? To keep my job with God. To hold my marriage and family together. Who was ever more Juggler of Our Lady than this old rebbie? As much the God jerk as any chanteuse out there in my rec room tuning her instrument or vocalizing scales.
Because let’s face it, I’m no world-beater. Lud, New Jersey, is not one of Judaism’s plummier posts. It’s hardly the Wailing Wall. Hell, it’s hardly Passaic. I haven’t mentioned it but it had already begun to see its better days. There is, for example, a small airfield in Lud, hardly more than an airstrip really. Its tattered windsock no longer waves more than a few inches away from its standard even in the strongest gale, and tough clumps of rag grass have not only begun to spring up through cracks in the cement but have started to puncture actual holes in the tarmac. The landing strip had been put in long before for the convenience of people who flew their own airplanes, wealthy, high-flying bereaved from all along the eastern seaboard, New York State and the near Middle West who didn’t want to deal with the traffic controllers at busy Teterborough a dozen miles off, and who came in not only for the actual funerals and unveilings but with guests and picnic hampers for casual weekend visits to the graves of their loved ones, and who were willing, even anxious, to stay in the tiny hotel that the funeral directors had had built, also for their convenience. Now, however, the landing field was hardly ever used and the hangar was just a place where the gravediggers and maintenance men stored their tools and parked their Cushmans and forklifts in an emergency.
It’s hard times.
Shull and Tober keep telling me so.
“Rabbi Goldkorn,” big Tober called out.
“Good morning, Reb Tober,” I said, raising an imaginary cap. “Good morning, Reb Shull.”
Sometimes, when we pass each other in the street, we pretend that Lud is this shtetl from the last century, this Ana Tevka of a town.