Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

Working variations in my head, versions of the instructions they dictated to their machines, reprises of the messages I had left on them, until, one thing leading to the other as it does in the act of drifting off, I lost my place and fell asleep.

And when the phone woke me the next morning and I heard Emile Tober’s voice, it was as if it had been a perfectly seamless night.

“Yes, Emile,” I said, “thanks for getting back to me. It’s about—”

“I know what it’s about! Just what in the hell is wrong with that lunatic daughter of yours? Has she fucking gone crazy? !”

BECAUSE she’s as single-minded as I am. Single-minded on my behalf, taking an even more single-minded view of things than I did. Not figuring the kibbutz into the equation, not figuring Ridgewood or Israel or the Law of the Return or any other loophole. Too single-minded for that, her single-minded eyes focused on one single-minded principle — Rabbi of Lud or nothing. More single-minded. (Because with me there was never any question of stealth, but then — give the devil her due — she wasn’t her father but only the helpless kid in the affair, so maybe she felt she had to. Well, of course she felt she had to, obviously she felt she had to, though — though this is the father in me talking — it was a perfectly reasonable, perfectly honorable stealth, like that famous letter hidden right in front of your eyes in the story — a sort of purloined stealth. Getting Shelley to drive her to all those libraries that spring and winter and even, when she was over the limit herself, to check out extra books for her on her card. And we worried because no matter how much work she did it didn’t seem to get reflected in her grades. To say nothing of the three or four hundred dollars she was able to put away by never volunteering to return the change we had coming to us, or by saving ten or eleven bucks out of the fifteen we gave her each week for her allowance. The little dickens.)

This is what she said in the deposition:

I, Constance Ruth Goldkorn, being of sound mind and body, do solemnly swear and attest that what I am about to affirm is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.

I didn’t know who she was. When I saw her that first time I didn’t recognize her from Adam and would have hurried away as fast as my legs could carry me, but of course I didn’t, and probably couldn’t, even though I wanted to because when I saw her that first time it was a snow day and the sidewalks and streets were all covered with ice and snow and it was very slippery out, which is the reason, she said, the schools were closed and our paths happened to cross in the first place.

I told her excuse me, that I was on this errand for my mom, and started to walk away from her, and that’s when she started to cry.

Which I thought was very curious. Not that she was crying because it was very cold out, ten or fifteen below maybe, and there were tears in my eyes too, only the tears in my eyes were because of the cold weather, that like icy stinging you get in your eyes when it’s real cold and you almost feel your eyeballs are going to crack, or those sharp, sticky pains that you get in your temples. I’m a little embarrassed to tell this next part, but my attorney, Counselor Christopher Rockers, says that a deposition is a testimony taken down under oath for use in court, although in this case there’s not going to be any trial or anything and I’m making this deposition only because I want what happened to go on the record. Anyway, the point is, the lady was not only crying but crying so hard she had this runny nose too. (I was raised in a cemetery, I know about Nature. I don’t get the giggles if a boy cuts a fart. I don’t go all squeamy when it’s that time of month. I know that bodily functions often have nothing to do with whether a person has or has not got bad manners. I’m like a kid on a farm in that respect.) Anyway, what was so curious was that the tears were pouring out her eyes and running down her cheeks, and the mucus was dripping out her nostrils just exactly as if she was crying indoors in a warm, toasty room and not outside on a cold, blustery ten- or fifteen-degree-below-zero snow day. That’s the sort of tears and mucus they were — soft, room temperature tears and mucus.

My father, Rabbi Jerome Goldkorn, works for Shull and Tober Funeral Directors of Lud, New Jersey, and even if I am only fourteen years old, I’ve been around enough unhappiness, sadness, sorrow, gloom and grief in my time almost to be able to tell the difference between them (and, if you ask me, I think it was all five), and certainly to swear that whatever it was that caused all that weeping didn’t have anything to do with weather.

Though you’d almost think it could have because all she had on was this — I don’t know how to describe it exactly — not a kimono or shroud, more like what those ladies wear in Middle East countries so men can’t look at them, that they wrap around them like a shawl and that covers their heads too — big blue gown like a housewife who’s locked herself outside her own house.

Now this next thing is embarrassing because it’s on me. I don’t have a whole lot of friends. My father thinks it’s because of where we live, and there’s some truth in that because there certainly aren’t a whole bunch of kids around here to play with. Anyway, even if I don’t have a lot of friends, those kids who do get to know me, the kids in my car pool, for example, or some of the people who know me from class, will tell you I’m shy, that I keep to myself and like to mind my own business. I’ll give an example that comes to my mind. Last year I graduated from Junior High and there was some foulup at the printer’s about the school colors — they’re brown and white, not green and red — and our yearbooks all had to go back to the bindery and we didn’t get to see them until after we actually graduated. What happened was, they sent us this announcement that the yearbooks were ready and that we could come to the gym and get them if we brought our receipt along to show that we’d paid. Only I had a bad cold the day we were supposed to pick up the yearbook and didn’t get to the school until three days later. They had to open the gym especially for me (which as you can probably imagine was pretty embarrassing just in itself), and Mrs. Sayles, the lady from the office who opened the gym, went to the table where they’d put all the yearbooks. “It’s too bad you had that cold, Connie,” she said, “or you could have written in your friends’ yearbooks.” Then she said, oh, well, at least mine had been inscribed, that she’d seen to it herself that the kids wrote something in all the kids’ yearbooks who couldn’t pick them up on the regularly scheduled day they were supposed to. Well, after she told me that I never got up the nerve to even open my yearbook. Because she’d made them write something in it, you see. I’m shy. I keep to myself. I mind my own business. It would have been like reading someone else’s mail.

That’s why I didn’t ask her anything. Like why she was crying, or if she was lost — I’d never seen her before — or cold in just her thin blue wrap, and made out like it was perfectly natural to find someone in the street on the coldest day of the year, crying like a baby with stuff coming out of its face, and even — and I’m really embarrassed about this part because shyness and keeping to yourself and minding your business are one thing and only part of a person’s particular makeup, but this was something else altogether, not just disposition but character — that people around here were free to behave like they want to behave, as if letting someone suffer was democracy in action or something and not asking them if any thing’s wrong is a plus, rather than the cruel minus I knew it was even then. And wouldn’t have even if she hadn’t turned the tables on me, making out as if it was me and not her standing out there in the street in this summery lightweight with the wind tearing at my head, and the temperature banging my blood to a standstill.