Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

I’ve already mentioned how I’m this agony expert. I wasn’t boasting. I wasn’t even trying to suggest that it’s a natural gift. I think it’s just what a person is accustomed to. If I’m able to tell which one is really in mourning and which one is probably only putting on a show, I don’t think I should get extra credit for it. As I say, it’s what a person gets accustomed to. You live and learn. I just happen to have this sort of perfect pitch for heartache. It’s unusual in a person of my years, I admit, but I come by it honestly. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that if I thought I was good at different shades of misery and grief, it was because I’d never seen this lady before. She made me feel insensitive. She made me feel like, well, some tone-deaf piker.

But this is a deposition and that last part, while it’s true as far as it goes, isn’t really what I was paying a lot of attention to at the time. I mean I really wasn’t into whether I was feeling insensitive or worrying about losing my perfect pitch for the somberness of the heart or not. Anyway, I hadn’t. Lost it, I mean. I could read hers, the somberness of her heart. And I was scared. Because what I saw there, in her woe, in her wracked heart, was the deepest mourning I’d ever seen. It was for me. She was in mourning for me !

I’m shy. I keep to myself. I mind my own business.

“Who are you?” I demanded.

She said, “I am the holy mother, Constance child.”

“What do you want? Why did you come? Why are you here?”

“For the harrowing of Lud’s cemeteries. For the harrowing of Pineoaks and Masada Gardens. To rescue the poor lost souls of righteous Jews.”

Well, maybe I am afraid of Lud, maybe I am. Maybe I am bothered by having only dead people for neighbors like my father thinks, or hurt because kids won’t play with me, who won’t even visit even though my mom drives the car pools and would not only go out of her way to pick them up in the first place but would bring them home too, even though I try to make my folks think that shyness and a solitary spirit and minding my business are part of my nature and not just these add-ons to my character like those cardboard cutouts in which you dress your paper dolls. (Because I’m not shy really. And don’t keep to myself by choice, or mind my business like some miser in his counting house in love with his ledger. No. Really I’m like some cheerleader and could name things even in Lud that swell my pom-pom heart and fill me with pride. Our monument carvers and landscapers, for example, are the best there are!) But even if I am, even if I am afraid to live here, even if I secretly agree with the kids who make fun of me because of what Lud stands for, I’m no anti-Semite! I’m no anti-Semite, and my first reaction was that the woman in blue was probably Seels’s wife. Seels is a vicious anti-Semite who probably felt exactly the same way the woman did. Only he wouldn’t have thought poor and he wouldn’t have thought righteous, and he wouldn’t have wanted to rescue them.

So, given the bite-my-tongue probables of my reputation, I did the only thing I could have done. I excused myself.

“Wait up. Hey, Connie, wait up,” said Holy Mother.

And, again given the house odds of my character, did. Like I might have waited on a girl friend, if I’d had one, who offered to walk me home. (I’ve seen them. Waiting for my mother, sometimes I’ve seen them. Boys walking boys, girls walking girls — they could almost be sweethearts, they could almost be sweethearts putting off for as long as they dared some significant curfew — as if, so long as they never quite reached their destination, or no, so long as they never stopped moving, shuffling in place, in front of their own addresses maybe, in motion like people treading water are in motion, wearing the pavement like mutual convoys in mutual seas. Waiting for Mom I’ve seen them make two-and-a-half round trips — and filled in, or at least wondered about, the others — that half or trip-and-a-half or even more that would have permitted them to come out even, as friends should. Or with one friend still graciously owing the other, or the other as graciously owed, the extra half trip that could always be made up tomorrow. Just speculating here as I — the other kids in the car pool off to one side — waited for my mother to come pick us all up, doing the even-steven, double-entry bookkeeping I thought was all there was to friendship.)

Did wait up. And strolled, just as if we were girl friends, Holy Mother and me, to the corner and back. (I’m fourteen-and-a-half years old but I’ve never had a sleepover or even been. So I don’t know what happens, if they’re more like camp than birthday parties, or closer to overnights in the woods than either, or treats after sports, say, the station wagon pulled up outside McDonald’s and the team piling out. Do they talk about boys? Who’s cute, who’s gross? Do they talk about how far they’ve gone, do they talk about who’s done it? Is it okay to go if it’s your time of month?) Walked to the corner with her and back to Sal’s, where my dad gets his hair cut. Walked to the corner, turned around and went to the florist’s and looked in Lou Pamella’s window and admired the flowers and Holy Mother said to me, “Oh, Connie, look at the lilies. Aren’t they gorgeous? I’ve always been partial to lilies.” And walked to the corner and crossed the street, and then we stopped outside Klein’s and Charney’s but neither of us said much and soon we were walking again. Despite the difference in our ages, or that she was divine and I was only this mortal female teenager, and just as if it wasn’t ten or fifteen below out, two best friends, chatting about life and stuff and harrowing Lud’s long main street.

Though you mustn’t think I’d forgotten that “rescue the poor lost souls of righteous Jews” remark.

I even called her on it, but she was real surprised, insulted I think, and explained how her family had always been Jewish, that she kept Shabbes even on the evening of the day her son got crucificated, busy as a bee, too busy to think, rushing around, so busy she didn’t have time to think about the neighbors, whether they’d remember to bring something, not to bring something, so she and the Magdalene doing it all, preparing the body, preparing the meal, the soup and boiled flanken, quick kasha cholent, kugel and sponge cake (though to tell the truth she wasn’t real hungry, no one was, or, if they were, they were too ashamed to admit it, and made the excuses people do at such times, that they were watching their diets, or it was too hot to eat, though she couldn’t think of anyone who’d come empty-handed — dishes of all sorts, dishes of all kinds, for every appetite — knishes and blintzes, latkes and noodles and farmer’s chop suey, challah and strudel, cabbage soup, beet borsch, lentil and barley bean), then lighting the candles like on any other Friday night. “It was a waste of good food,” said Holy Mother, “a sin with kids going hungry,” and then somebody suggested they go find some Roman soldiers who might still be peckish after eating their pound of flesh and maybe offer them some of the food, and Holy Mother saying how she knew that the person speaking meant it as a joke, but that she didn’t happen to be in the mood for joking right then (and added how she didn’t know at the time, telling me how you could have knocked her over with a feather, how, quite frankly, she would have thought you were a cuckoo clock if you’d have told her that two days later her son would be out of His tomb, gone, pfffft, just like that, and up in Heaven having the last laugh, or she wouldn’t have snapped at that fellow who made the joke about giving the soldiers some of the food, and that she might actually have gone out and done it herself, or invited them in, and that, who knows, it might have made better people out of them because didn’t they say you are what you eat, and would anyone in his right mind honestly argue that good kosher cooking wasn’t better for your disposition, personality and character than having to live on dry hardtack and stale Roman rations, but that seriously, it was a shame she hadn’t known, that not only would it have bucked them all up to have known what was what, but just to have had a sign, something, that remark to the gonif on the cross—“You will this day be with me in Paradise”—what, this was a sign ? this was something you said to a child to calm it down), and that believe it or not, of all the things that happened that day, this was what she regretted the most, her rudeness to the fellow who’d made that remark about feeding the soldiers, that — and here she asked if I could keep a secret, and, oh, if ever there was a time for me to think, Well, good for you, Connie, that’s just exactly what best friends say to each other! that was the time for me to think it, even though I know that by going on the record like this I’m not keeping it — she personally had a very particular problem about hurting people’s feelings, what with all her husband Joseph was put through and suffered because of her. I didn’t know what she was talking about but understood just from the way she said it that it was something really important. I suppose I was testing her friendship, but I asked her flat out. She told me what had happened. “Oh, wow!” I said.