Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

“It ain’t easy for me to get girls,” he’d confessed another time. “Hell,” he said, “it ain’t easy for me to get full grown-up women. Pie bakers, widows, ladies with varicose in their veins, blue rinse in their hair, yellow in their underpants. It ain’t even the immorality of it, that they know I’m this only recently widowered old man. You know what it is? They know I’m a mortician. How? It ain’t the first thing I tell them. I think maybe they sniff it on my fingers. Me, who hasn’t personally handled a stiff since to tell you the truth I don’t even remember. Handled? Looked at in the casket even. Who can say? Maybe they smell the flowers on me, all that death grass. You think that don’t make a difference? You think so? I’m telling you, Rabbi Jerry, I drive these ladies to their own bank accounts! An evening with yours truly and they’re looking for the Neiman Marcus catalogue, the Henri Bendel. A night on the town with me and they’re circling the item, checking off the size, choosing out the color, turning down the page.”

“Hey, listen,” he said yet another time, “it isn’t as if I’m bringing you the news. You’re the rabbi here. You’re familiar with what goes on. Death’s your speciality, so I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know or haven’t thought about plenty. Only, the way I see it, with you it’s not so geferlech. There’s even something spiritual about it, some natural order business, God’s plan, that people like me don’t even think about. Sunrise, sunset. Whatever. But personally, and speaking strictly for myself, and given the nature of the business even, I’ve got to be thinking ‘Here today and gone somewhere else tomorrow.’ Hell, that is the way I think. It’s the way Tober thinks too, even if he comes at it from a different priority. So I’ll tell you what’s on my mind.”

“I know what’s on your mind,” I said.

“Rabbi, please,” he said, “give me a break. You know as well as I do it’s all in the details.”

“What’s up, then? What is it?”

“This AIDS business is doing me in. I don’t think I can handle it.”

“AIDS? What do you mean? Who’s got AIDS?”

“Not me. I don’t know, nobody. It’s a figure of speech, a sign of the times, just one more straw. I told you about the fingers, that maybe they sniff on me what I do? They go further. They flinch when I touch them. They’re thinking, you know, the blood. God knows what they think. But they do, they flinch when I touch them. That’s my stock in trade. Contact. Comfort. My hand on their arm. I lose that, I lose everything.

“They’re terrified out there, Rabbi. They’re shaking in their shoes. No, no, I mean it. They’ve soured on the venereal. Something’s up. Something vicious and narrow-spirited that robs us of our consolations. Jesus, Rov, there ain’t even tea dancing no more, one two three, one two three. What am I, a spring chicken? I’m an old fart. They look at me they’ve got to be thinking ‘Do I need this? I don’t need this.’ I’m wrong they sniff it on my fingers, I’m wrong they smell the flowers on my suit. They breathe it in the ground, in the clods and clumps of my sanctified fields. It sticks to their nostrils, it goes to their heads.” He leaned toward me, he lowered his voice. “There are eleven AIDS victims in the ground here.”

“Hey.”

“Eleven I know of, eleven that’s sure.”

“Hey.”

“This mustn’t get out. It would devastate business. We agreed,” Shull said. “Me and Tober. We made a policy decision.

“Because,” he said, “he saves his money like a miser and I spend mine like a drunk sailor. And because you just ain’t doing your part, Rabbi. Content to call ’em as you see ’em, happy like a clam with all those Ecclesiastes checks and balances of your position, all bought into the goeth ups and cometh downs, the milchiks and fleishiks seasonals. Well, me too. Me too, Rebbe Goldkorn! It’s fucking now or fucking never!”

“What are you saying to me? Why are you talking to me like this?”

“Ach,” said Shull.

“Why would he speak like that?” I asked Tober when I saw him. “What’s he trying to tell me?”

“Argh,” said Tober.

“What do you want from me?” I demanded of both. “I do my job. Don’t I do my job? Is it Charney? Is it Klein? Is that why you’re pressuring me?”

“Phoo,” they agreed.

“And what’s all this about AIDS?”

“You told him?” Tober snapped.

“I told him a figure of speech, I told him a metaphor.”

“You told him.”

“I told him about eleven people,” Shull said. “I never told him we’re the Holy Faygeleh Sacred Burial Ground.”

My God, I thought, they’re crazy. Those multiple hundred-sixty-eight-or-so cubic dirt feet lots again. The policy decision. Burying AIDS victims their bold new marketing scheme!

Tober came to the house. He was pushing Edward in a wheelchair.

“Hello,” Tober said, “shalom.”

“Hello,” I said. “How are you, Edward?”

“May I leave him with you a minute?”

“Sure,” I said.

“We’re not disturbing you?”

“No,” I said. “Of course not.”

“Interrupting anything?”

“Of course not.”

“I’ll be twelve minutes.”

“Take your time.”

“He means well,” Edward said when his father had left.

“Oh,” I said, “he’s a good man.”

“He’s a driven, self-centered, totally obsessive human being, but he means well.”

“Well, Edward,” I said, a little embarrassed as I often was with him, “you’re looking fit.”

It was true. For all his handicaps, his blindness and the fluids sloshing and tumbling in his inner ears like water in a washing machine, Edward was as poised and equable as a man with a pipe. He appeared to lounge in his wheelchair, like a fellow sitting up, taking his ease on a pal’s hospital bed. Though it wasn’t, you imagined one leg crossed smartly over the other. His opaque, fashionable glasses fit comfortably across his face like a dark, thin strip of style on the eyes of a musician. I knew that if he removed the glasses, the clear eyes behind them would seem intelligent, tolerant, amused. As I had before, I wondered again if he knew how elegant he was, how he’d developed — he evidently chose his own clothes — his graceful impeccables and flawless stunnings. He’d been blind since birth.

“In my dreams,” he told me, “I’m someone else altogether.”

I’m sorry?

“You remarked my appearance,” Edward Tober said, “you said I looked fit.”

“You do, kayn aynhoreh.”

“In my dreams I am.”

“That’s terrific.”

“I can see in my dreams.”

“Really?”

“Quite clearly, in fact. Twenty-twenty the gnarled, brown stems of apples, the tight weave of wicker or the nubbing of towels. All twenty-twenty. Inches perceiving, acres and rods and nautical miles. Weights and measures, metric equivalencies. The size of a pint. The heft of a scruple, the length of a dram. All calibration’s ordered ranks, where the decimal goes, the bull’s-eye’s dead center, or where to put your nail to hang a picture on the wall twenty-twenty. The stain of the sky in a time zone, presented the hour, given the pressure, the weather, the wind. My dreams as matched to reality as pairs of perfectly teamed horses. I see in my dreams. The orange’s blemished, unfortunate pores, its pitted sheen. I see in my dreams.”

“Vai, such a megillah!”

“I do,” Edward said, “I can. Things most blind men don’t even know about, let alone see.”

“The emes?”

“Freckles like a personal astronomy, suntan like the cream in your coffee.”