Edith Pearlman - Binocular Vision - New & Selected Stories

“Why is Mrs. Sam so strange?” I’d asked my mother.

“She drinks.” My mother knew about drinking. She worked in a family-service agency.

At ten thirty, right after the patriarch had taken an entire pot by winning both high and low, Mother pushed back her chair. “Count me out.”

“Already?” Sam moaned.

The men continued to play. My mother took the platter from the refrigerator and plugged in the coffee while I removed the empty beer glasses from the table and cut a defrosted carrot cake into eight slices. My mother loaded the glasses into the dishwasher, and I resumed my perch on the high stool and at last allowed myself to observe the rabbi. I did this at Margie’s behest. I myself was in love with our chemistry teacher.

The rabbi was about thirty. He had a doctorate in sociology as well as a certificate of ordination, and he knew how to play the guitar. He was haltingly eloquent. Since his arrival two years earlier, attendance at Saturday-morning services had swollen. Every Friday night, Margie washed her hair with shampoo and then with flea soap, which added body. On Saturday mornings she put on a velvet skirt and a blouse with romantic sleeves. She walked to the synagogue. After services she descended to the social hall and drank the sweet wine and the seed cookies the Sisterhood provided. Sooner or later she edged toward the rabbi. The women behind the refreshments stiffened. Poor motherless vamp! Margie said something about the Torah portion. The interpretation was always borrowed from the Hertz commentaries but the vivacity was all her own. The rabbi gave her a kindly reply. She moved away.

The game now being dealt was seven-card Stud. The rabbi unabashedly peeked twice at his hole cards. His eyes were as black as calligrapher’s ink. There were faint smudges under them. His hair made my fingers tingle. All at once I became unable to reconstruct the chemistry teacher’s face in my mind. The white chip I had picked up earlier scorched my groin. I was no longer peeking at the rabbi for Margie’s sake; now I was feasting my eyes on him for myself. I noticed that he had stopped checking on his pair. Through the medium of the darkened kitchen window, he was feasting his eyes on my mother.

That chilly replica of our kitchen in the window was like a photograph that a son of mine might one day look at; he’d cautiously name me and my parents and wonder about the identity of the other five figures — the theatrical man with the gray hair, the bearded old fellow, the Latin lover, the shrimp, the young man burning up inside. I thought of my inquisitive descendant, not yet born, and then I thought of the Czech Torah, alone in its locked room, waiting to be born again. I shivered and shook myself — not like a dog, I hoped, again eyeing the rabbi. Maybe like a water nymph?

The rabbi lost to the patriarch, as I recall. It was now the last game. Dad announced pot limit, an unbuckled end to the evening. Pot limit was five-card Draw: any number of raises allowed, and you could bet the amount that was already on the table.

My father dealt. Chips hit the table immediately. Dad’s was the only hand I could see. He wisely folded a jack/ten when it was his turn, but everybody else stayed in for three raises. At the draw everybody took two cards except for the rabbi, who took none.

There was a hoarse murmuring at this display of strength or nerve.

“Check,” the patriarch said.

“Check,” the cantor echoed.

The rabbi bet the pot. It amounted by then to five dollars or so.

“Too rich for me,” Sam said, and folded.

But the usurer, smiling his tolerant smile, raised back. The patriarch and the cantor folded.

And then the rabbi raised again. I stepped down from my stool and slid behind the patriarch. I heard a squish: the pumpkin on the windowsill had imploded. I passed the cantor and stopped behind the rabbi. He held four spades to the king, and the nine of clubs.

Shocked by this four-flush that our man of God was so recklessly promoting, I nonetheless managed to obey my father’s directions. I did not snicker, did not gasp, did not smile, did not frown, did not incline my head farther or change the angle of my shoulders or grip the back of the rabbi’s chair any tighter than I was already gripping it. But my forehead felt as if a flame had been brought very near, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that my hair was on fire.

The usurer glanced up in order to evaluate the rabbi’s face. He could not have avoided seeing mine, too. Who could fault him for misinterpreting my close-wrapped excitement? — I must be looking down on a royal straight flush, he’d have thought; or at least four of a kind.

“The pot’s yours,” the usurer said graciously to the rabbi. He showed his straight, which he was not obliged to do. The rabbi collapsed his own fan of cards with one hand and collected the discards with the other and merged his nothing with the other nothings. He was under no obligation to show what he’d held. I knew that good poker strategy recommended allowing yourself sometimes to be caught in a failed bluff. But a successful bluff is best not proclaimed, particularly one that you guess has been aided by the kibitzer behind your back. My father told me later that my face resembled a tomato.

THOUGH THE CEREMONY to receive the Czech Torah was scheduled to begin at two o’clock, the entire congregation and a host of other people had assembled by a quarter before the hour.

We crowded into the pews of the sanctuary — an octagonal room paneled in light oak, its broad windows unmediated by stained glass. The room glowed in the radiant afternoon.

My parents and I had arrived at half past one. I entered between them as if they were marrying me, but they let me take the seat on the aisle. I watched people come in. Mrs. Sam leaned noticeably against her husband. His body adopted a matching slant, and he seemed to be doing the walking for them both. Margie swished down the aisle on her grandfather’s arm. She was wearing an outfit that Azinta must have helped her assemble — an orange caftan, an orange turban, and silver earrings the size of kiddush cups. The mayor nodded to several acquaintances. The university provost nodded to no one. Other Christians looked stiffly appreciative, as if they were at a concert. Azinta held hands with her Viking lover. She wore a pioneer’s high-necked dress in a brown shade that just matched her skin. I wondered if she was now speaking with a Scandinavian accent.

At exactly two o’clock Mrs. Cantor marched across the bimah to the lectern. In a manly voice she welcomed us. “This is a momentous occasion,” she boomed. “It is the culmination of the efforts of many people.” Her speech was brief. Perhaps it was not meant to be brief, but by the time she had reached the fifth or sixth sentence, our attention was diverted to the rear of the sanctuary.

The cantor stood in the open double portal. He was wearing the white robe of the Days of Awe. His arms were wrapped around the Czech Torah, not confidently, as when he carried our Law on Shabbat, but awkwardly, as if he held something fragile. The scroll, swaddled in yellowing silk, might have been an ailing child.

The cantor moved forward. His footfalls were silent on the thick carpet of the aisle. There was no organ, no choir. There was no sound at all. Behind the cantor walked the rabbi, also enrobed. His eyes were fixed on the spindles of the Torah that poked above the cantor’s white shoulder. Behind the rabbi marched the officers of the temple, talliths over their business suits. The usurer’s tango glide was restrained.

The little crowd of talliths followed the two white robes down the middle aisle and across the front aisle and up the three stairs to the bimah and across the bimah toward the lectern. The cantor stopped short of the lectern, though, and turned to face the members of the congregation. The rabbi turned, too. The elders, unrehearsed, bumped into their priests, and there was some shuffling on the platform, and one old man almost fell. Soon everyone was still. The cantor’s wife had disappeared. But I saw her green shoulder bulking in the front row. Then I lost sight of it as the congregation, without any signal, rose.