And just who was this changed, charged-up guy, myself, I wondered, already worrying overhead, list price, living expenses, the price of beans — I’d rubbernecked the big red numbers in the windows of the supermarkets, chalked on the blackboards outside the gas stations, and tried to read how much the price of a ticket would set me back off the little sign in the cashier’s cubicle of the movie theaters — just who was this new economic being, me, Spiritual Man figuring, comparison shopping, getting his estimates, counting his chickens? I hadn’t had to think about this stuff since moving to Lud. Who was I kidding? I’d never had to think about this stuff. And why, I wondered, was I so perky? What was so awfully terrific about real life?
“Rabbi Petch? It’s me, Jerry Goldkorn,” I chippered at the man who came to the door and peered through the blinds at me.
“We don’t need any,” he said, and turned away.
“I’ve come thousands of miles. Rabbi Petch? Rabbi Petch?”
“Who wants to know?”
“It’s me, Jerry Goldkorn. Rabbi Goldkorn? From Lud, New Jersey? We’ve corresponded.”
He opened the door a ways, studied me for a minute, then stepped aside so I could enter. I put three fingers to my lips, kissed them, and touched them to the mezuzah on the door frame, seeing too late that it was a thermometer.
He stared at me. “Boy,” he said, “are you religious! Never mind, it’s an honest mistake in this country. Come in, hurry, come in, you’ll let in the iceberg.” He shut the door behind me. “Did you hear a weather report? Is it supposed to snow?”
“I haven’t seen a paper, I didn’t watch the news. But it seems pretty nice out, fairly clear, not very cold.”
“Nice out,” he said, “clear. Not very cold. Oh, boy, have you got a lot to learn! Don’t stand there! What’s wrong with you? Quick,” he said, “go to the southwest corner of the living room!”
“The southwest—?”
“Where all the furniture is.”
It was true. All the furniture in the rabbi’s small parlor seemed to have been stuffed into a single corner. Even his books. It looked as if he were waiting for movers to come and put it all on a truck.
“I don’t even bother taping sheets of plastic to the windows anymore, tacking felt strips to the threshold.”
“You don’t?”
“Nah,” Rabbi Petch said. “What, are you kidding me? Insulate this place? Ol’ Hawk want to come through, you think he let some itty piece of felt stop him? A dinky piece of plastic? Don’t make me laugh. Shit! He huff and he puff and he blow the house down.”
I gathered the rabbi was hipped on weather. He seemed to read my mind.
“I think about it more than I do about God,” he said. “I reflect on it!”
“On weather?”
“What then?” he said. “Of course weather, certainly weather. You have to. You see anything else around here? You want to stay alive in this climate you have to.”
“Actually, it’s rather pleasant out.”
“It can turn on you like that,” Rabbi Petch said. “Storms blow up in a minute. A tempest, a blizzard. Gales, cloudbursts, the avalanche. Hoarfrost and rime. Lightning and thunder. All the inclements. There’s no telling what could happen. The northern lights could melt your frostbite, take off your toes. A glacier could fall on your foot, sandstorms from Araby put out your eyes.”
“Really?”
“Sure,” Petch said, “absolutely. Spit, fire! Spout, rain! Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow, you cataracts and hurricanoes! Hey,” he said, “you want a cup of tea?”
“I wouldn’t want you to go to any trouble.”
“What trouble, I’m glad of the company. Go to the southwest corner of the room and sit down. Make yourself comfortable, I’ll put on the kettle. No,” he said, “push the piano out of the way. Try to squeeze your behind past the desk and sofa. Watch out for your knees, that wooden bench is murder. I think you’d be more comfortable in the La-Z-Boy. Just don’t lean back.”
I could hear him humming to himself in the kitchen, apparently as free of worry as any happy-go-lucky kid who’d never even heard the word “meteorology.”
As I had reminded the rabbi, we’d been corresponding. He was listed under Alaska in Who’s Who in the Rabbinate, and I’d first written him a week or so after I’d answered Alyeska’s little classified in the Times. He hadn’t mentioned weather in those letters and now I thought I understood why. He didn’t want to scare me off. It was supposed to be a tradeoff. If things worked out. A good word from him to his board, a good word from me to Tober and Shull. (Who would have snapped him up, who even back then, in the seventies, weren’t besieged by rabbis who wanted any part of their job — my job — who’d had to replace me with a kid still in yeshiva and, in return for my promise to return to Lud after a year, had permitted Shelley and the baby to stay on in that company house in that company town.) He’d been the one to introduce the possibility of my staying in Anchorage in the event I liked it up here. He’d made Alaska’s frontiersmen Jews sound fascinating, hunters, fishermen, firemen, farmers — all busted stereotype, exotic, say, as black cowboys. In one letter he’d written that gentiles controlled the garment and jewelry store industries, that if you wanted to buy your wife a mink coat for your anniversary or have a nice cocktail ring made up for her birthday you went to guys named Norton or Adams or Jones to get one wholesale. It made perfect sense, he said. It had to do with the East India and Hudson’s Bay companies. It had to do with the L.L. Bean catalogue and the deep, goyishe roots working the frozen soils of the mercantile.
“So,” Petch bubbled when he came back with our tea, threading the obstacle course of his cornered furniture without ever spilling a drop, “so.” He eased himself onto the piano bench, set his burden down on the desk and, despite the fact that he’d drawn his legs as far back as he reasonably could, crushed his knees against the sofa. “So,” he said again. “Cozy.”
“Very cozy,” I agreed.
“Yes,” he said, “but it’s hard sometimes to tell the difference between what’s genuinely cozy and what’s only cabin fever. That’s why I won’t wear the sort of shirt you’ve got on.”
It was a red-and-black checked wool Pendleton I had on, and I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“That lumberjackie stuff. You look like a wood chopper. It gives me cabin fever just to look at you. Brr. I’ve got the chills. Brr. My teeth are chattering. I can smell your long Johns.”
“They wear these shirts up here.”
“More folks die of cabin fever in this state than they do of cancer, than they do of the heart attack, shoveling snow. It’s why I wear a suit, it’s why I wear a tie. It’s why I go around the house like it was Yom Kippur downtown. When they find me I’ll look like I put up a fight.”
“Really,” I said, “it’s not that bad out.”
“I know what I know,” the rabbi said darkly.
“What do you do about services?”
“I call off services.”
“They don’t object to that?”
“I tell them it’s a snow day, we’ll make it up later.”
“They stand still for this? Does everyone have cabin fever?”
“Everyone.”
“Rabbi Petch,” I said, “I’m drinking your tea, I’m eating your biscuits. It’s not my place to quarrel with you, but I’ve got to believe you’re having me on. That maybe this is something you do up here. Some initiation thing, to see can I take it, do I have the right stuff, as if I’d crossed the equator for the first time, or passed the international date line. To tell the truth, you’re mixing me up. In your letters you made it sound attractive. Now it’s as if you were trying to spook me. It’s not necessary. We had no deal. I’m not moving in on you. The people in New Jersey don’t even know about you. They don’t know my intentions. I have no intentions. I told you what the position is, what my situation entails. That this was just supposed to be a break for me, to see how I worked out in the parishes, to see could I handle the pastoral parts.”