Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

“What can one say about such a man? We see how loved he was all the way down the line. A second cousin is his chief mourner!

“Yes, and Cousin Levine tells me our beloved friend was a passionate, organized, misunderstood, scientific sort of man. Passionate. Organized. Scientific. Misunderstood. Ask yourselves, what does Talmud tell us it means when a man is passionate and scientific? When he’s well-organized and misunderstood? It tells us,” I told them, “it tells us that what we’re dealing with here is a super Jew, maybe the Messiah.

“That’s right, you heard me. The Messiah. Messiah Himself.”

It was, I recall thinking, the perfect touch. They were outraged. They stared at me in disbelief and wanted, I saw, to knock me down. They still wept, but now their tears were angry, furious in fact, so intense they might have scalded their retinas and burned through their cheeks.

“God takes,” I said, not through with them yet, “a Moses, He takes an Abraham and throws in an Isaac. He adds a Jacob and adds a Joshua. He takes an Elijah and stirs in a David. He folds in a Solomon and a Daniel, you homemakers and balebostes. He takes the First and Second Isaiahs and adds a dash of Noah, a pinch of Job. He separates your Maccabees, First and Second, and mixes with an Ezekiel.

“He takes,” I said, glaring at them and leaning forward, “He takes a Josef …”

I broke off and slipped into the Kaddish. It was just one more thing. They wouldn’t know. You say Kaddish at the graveside. Also, a lone man may lay t’phillim, but it takes a minyan of ten Jewish males to make a Kaddish. Me, Shull and Tober were the only Jews in the room. All my wailing, breast-knocking and trilled broches didn’t mean a thing. In God’s eyes the Kaddish not only didn’t count, it never happened! This is a Jewish mystery.

Shull’s grin had disappeared. I was pretty sure he was aware I knew what was up. What difference did it make? Nothing would happen. They kept me on because I was their stooge. They thought they could manipulate me. They knew I’d look the other way. It was all right with me. Why would I want to be in a Pittsburgh? Why would I care to go to a New York? My Shelley was here.

On the way to the cemetery I sat between Shull and Tober. We rode along in silence for a while. Then Shull chuckled. “That was one hell of a job you did back there,” he said and patted my thigh. “One hell of a job!”

“It was,” Tober agreed.

“I never heard anything like it.”

“Neither did I,” said Tober.

“You gave them a real run for their money, a real, what-do-you-call-it, catharsis.”

“You sure did,” Tober said.

“What an idea,” said Shull, shaking his head. “What a thing to do.”

“Messiah recipes.”

“Mocking their dead.”

“Making them feel guilty.”

“Having them eat their misery like pie.”

“Lick their loss like a lollipop. A catharsis. A real catharsis.”

“They’ll owe you forever. They’ll never forget it.”

“None of us will. Though you might have added,” Tober added, “about how they loan him all that money to open his hat place in Garden City, then, after he’s sick, when his visitors leave and his painkillers kick in, he turns around and jimmies the books on them right from his hospital room. Or how his widow wouldn’t come to his funeral because she was too humiliated.”

My God, a widow-humiliating book-jimmier! How could I have thought he was Mengele? Or any other high-up or low-down Nazi either? How could I? Because. Because you want to believe. Because you want to believe all the high jinks, all the back-room, front-page, deep-throat kinkery and irregularity, all the rumor, all the talk. Because you want to believe there’s all-out, anything-goes evil in the world, conspiracy, Armageddon moving in like a cold front, anything, whatever keeps you engaged. Like you want to believe there’s a God.

How could I? Because the honeymoon was starting to wind down, the three or four years of desert-isle lust and abandon beginning to feel more like four than three. She wasn’t there that morning and I hadn’t even realized she was missing, and both of us, me with the distractions that my work sometimes offered or that I could invent, and Shelley with her visits and Lady Bountiful routines, were just beginning to look around.

“I stay open,” Sal said, “in the hopes that Lud will grow and I can turn this place into a real barbershop one day.” He was brushing loose hairs from my jacket with one of those yellow, short-handled whisk brooms you don’t see anymore or you’d buy one.

“Nice job, Sal,” I told him, admiring myself in the mirror. “The wife’s been after me to get this done.” I handed him his money and waved off the change.

“Thanks,” Sal said, then made his voice lower than ever. I had to strain to hear him. “The gangland killing in that restaurant over in Brooklyn? Joe ‘Black Olives’ Benapisco that they shot bullets in his eyes?”

“Yes?”

“I think I may have to style his hair.”

“Sal,” I said, “come on.”

“No shit,” he said. “And Rabbi?”

“What is it?”

“There’s some bones and ashes I’m supposed to put into his pockets with him. Some ground-up teeth.”

“What?”

I couldn’t hear him.

“What’s that?” I said. “Who?”

“Jimmy Hoffa,” he whispered.

IN LUD, on the night before a funeral, you used to be able to see, through the wide plate glass of the funeral homes, the dead laid out in their caskets. The practice was discontinued when the oversight committee that passes on such things, that determines the height of the buildings you can put up and rules on the color of the bricks you may use, decided that however convenient it was for the old and infirm to be driven past their loved ones lying in state behind the mortuary’s big windows and view them from their cars, it never quite made up for a certain lapse in taste, that the deceased always looked too much like the lobsters one picks out for one’s dinner at the bottom of the tanks in seafood restaurants.

It was before her time, so I’d been explaining this to my daughter, Constance, filling her in on the history and heritage of Old Lud.

During the school year Connie was off in Fairlawn much of the day, but recently I’d begun to notice that the kid was behaving a little uneasily, that she’d go to her room as soon as she came home and bury herself in homework, most of it for extra credit. Connie had never been what you’d call a grind, but now she asked her mother to drive her to the libraries over in Wyckoff or Ridgewood almost every day for the books she used for those seemingly endless research projects she was working on that year. She’d return with armloads, entire shelves, but soon complained that the public libraries in those smaller towns had limited holdings and that only the main library in Newark could serve her learned purposes.

“Oy,” Shelley would kvell, pointing after Connie as she disappeared into her room, proudly beaming and breaking out into her broken, makeshift Yiddish. “Look at the daughter-le, the scholar-le. Just like the papa-le!”

And now she came back with two times the books, three. Shelley checked books out for her on her card.

We started to worry she wasn’t getting enough fresh air, we began to fret about her eyes.

But when school was out that year Connie’s grades were about the same as they’d always been, maybe a little poorer. We’d seen the books she was always reading, the pens she used up, the pencils she wore down.

And now, in summer, she wouldn’t leave the house at all, but, having discovered term papers, continued to write them, to take on abstruse, incredible, impossible topics — how the discovery of rubber and the invention of the bouncing ball were responsible for the idea of points in sports, what, given the notion of the diatonic scale, the first tune would have had to have been.