“Come on,” I’ll tell them, “cemetery plots, cemetery plots here! Get your cemetery plots! I’m the ashes-to-ashes man, the dust-to-dust kid comin’ at you! Get your cemetery plots!”
And while they look up at me, staring, wondering (no longer recalling — last month’s talk now — exactly whose father I’m supposed to be) about me, maybe even a little frightened, gentle Jews unaccustomed to the stench of brimstone, more used, at least the older ones, to the odor of cooking, the smell of vaguely camphorous stews and briskets in the hall, family people (or why would they be here in the first place?), no use for mishegoss, impatient with it but too polite to say so, unapocalyptic altogether, I’ll finally tell them something that strikes a chord, that actually rings a bell.
“What, were you brought up in a barn? You weren’t brought up in a barn.
“Look,” I’ll say, “it’s like this:
“Who dies? Your children die. You die. Everyone dies. Your parents and uncles. Your cousins and aunts. Your wife and your husband. No, no, don’t you dare say ‘God forbid.’ What, God forbid God? I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. He wasn’t raised in a barn. It’s how He picks up after Himself. Death’s just the way He keeps up His housekeeping. He’s a balebatish kind of God. He’s neat as a pin. He makes us natural disasters no insurance policy in the world would cover us against, but He forbids us to lie in the rubble. It’s simple as that, ladies and gentlemen. It’s simple as that, my good friends. From the beginning. It was always as simple as that.
“Didn’t He guide Noah, didn’t He instruct Moses right down to the last cubit of the chore? Ain’t that His wont? Ain’t God in the details? Well, then. You think He’d trouble with the minutiae of weights and measures and then fail to ordain those hundred-sixty-eight-or-so cubic dirt feet of His holy metrics? What, you think so? Get outta here!
“Because the reason there was a Diaspora in the first place was just that Canaan’s soil was too sandy ever to hold a grave steady! Why do you suppose He jerked the Jews around for forty years in that wilderness? To prepare them, to get them ready. Because if you can scratch out those hundred-sixty-eight-or-so cubic feet and bury your dead in just sand, you can bury them anywhere!
“It’s that important. It’s that important to Him. And that’s the reason for markers. (Didn’t I tell you we die? Didn’t I mention that everyone does?) Because how could He find us otherwise? That’s why it’s important we bury our dead, His dead. Why none dast break the chain of relation. Just so He can find us again if he should need us!
“Plots here!” I’ll hawk. “Cemetery plots here! Get your plots here! Nuclear and extended-family cemetery plots here! Get ’em while they last! Get ’em while you do!”
And they did. The harder, more outrageous the sell, the quicker and more eager they were to take me up on it, as if as long as they had to die anyway I could somehow sanctify their passage, or at least make the absurdity of their death le dernier cri, lending just that in-the-swim spin of flair and style and currency to it. I might have been that season’s caterer or society band leader. Nothing would serve but that they have their little plot of death from the Rabbi of Lud. I was good for business.
It didn’t last long. Probably no more than four or five weeks. So it didn’t last long. It couldn’t have. (Though if it had lasted even a little longer I’d probably have started to earn my commissions.) Anyway it didn’t, and the talk, already dying down when Tober and Shull traded me to Klein and Charney, had ceased now altogether. The archbishop, had I tried to get through to him — which I didn’t — would probably have taken my call. So either the talk had died down, or it no longer made a difference to anyone that my daughter used to receive Holy Mother socially. People were asking to have me at their funerals again — Sal called to tell me it had got back to some people he knew what a good job I did — and Klein and Charney, suspecting, I suppose, if not the staying power of such campaigns then the staying power of such campaigners, proposed trading me back to Shull and Tober.
It was about this time I heard from Al Harry Richmond in Chicago.
“I’m sorry about Stan Bloom, Al Harry,” I told him. “I gave her all I got.”
“Sure,” Al Harry said.
“I did,” I assured him. “I tried my best. I went after her tooth and nail. But you know how it is,” I said, holding my hands up for him almost a thousand miles away. “The old gray mare.”
“You saying she ain’t what she used to be,” Al Harry said.
“That’s right. That’s so.”
“Goddamn it, Goldkorn, she never was.”
“Oh, yes, Al Harry,” I said. “Don’t you recall Wolfblock and our charmed lives? We couldn’t get arrested, or come down with a cold.”
“I recall a thousand Kaddishes. I recall all that grief and remember thinking it’s a good thing death ain’t contagious.”
“Oh, no, Al Harry, that was some minyan, that minyan of ours. We were the ten musketeers. I even got a vocation out of it. And that was some Wolfblock, that Wolfblock of ours. What a character! I miss that old man.” But couldn’t get a rise out of him, or catch him up in my nostalgia, or any other of the historical sympathies who’d already, it seemed, let bygones be bygones. “Gee,” I mused, “ain’t it odd? Your turning out to be our sort of social secretary and all, the one who keeps up. I mean, I’m the one that came to New Jersey and turned out to be the rabbi, and you’re the one who stayed in Chicago and turned out to be the pope.”
“There’s one in every minyan,” Al Harry said. I listened to the contempt he couldn’t keep out of his voice.
“Listen,” I told him, “you only heard one side of the story. Ain’t you learned yet that anybody can make a good impression with just one side of the story?”
“A good impression? A good impression?” Al Harry shot back. “With her punim on matchbooks and milk cartons? On coupons to Resident offering half off on film, on tools and detergent? A good impression?! I wasn’t even struck by the goddamn likeness! Tell me, Rabbi, how come you didn’t give them a more recent photograph?”
“I didn’t have one.”
“Ahh,” said Al Harry.
“Al Harry,” I said, “it’s not what you think. Connie shies out of pictures. Literally. Really. She does. She jumps out of focus the minute you snap. Or ducks under parallax quick as a wink. She leans her head into shadows and wards you off with one hand to the side of her face, or a hankie she’s pulled out of the sky you didn’t even know she had. They don’t make ASA ratings or shutter speeds fast enough to catch her. She thinks,” I confessed, “she’s homely.”
“Oh, Goldkorn. Oh, Jerry.”
“I’m a different person now,” I told him. “You don’t judge a guy by the length of his haphtarah passage.”
“She’s flying into Newark,” he said. “I’ll call you when her plane takes off.”
“God bless you, Al Harry. Thanks, thanks a lot. Oh, and Al Harry?”
“What is it?”
“That picture of Connie that they ran in the Star? That didn’t come out until after the matchbooks and milk cartons had already gone to press.”
“Oh, Jerry,” he said, “oh, Goldkorn.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
And he didn’t, of course. Because how could he? Because it’s just like I said. No one can know the other side of a person’s life.
ten
HANGDOG. I was hangdog. Shelley was sheepish. Connie was like a little jellyfish. We seemed, come together outside the gate in the Newark airport where the TWA flight from Chicago had just landed, like characters in a fable, a little bestiary of the wishy-washy. Like embarrassed Animal Crackers.