Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

(I understand this is only one girl’s experience, and how if anyone appreciates that there might be more than one way to skin a cat it would certainly be God, but it all seemed so direct and straightforward a procedure, I find it almost impossible to believe it’s ever, or ever very often, otherwise. I acknowledge it could be, and agree there are historical instances when it probably was, but I’ll lay you dollars to donuts those precedents were rare exceptions. For one, there’s the forcelessness-of-revelation thing. By which I never meant feints and codes, riddles and misdirection. Put yourself in Heaven’s place a minute. Walk a mile in its golden slippers. The name of the game is communication. Why revelation is forceless has less to do with the subtlety of the message than with the stubbornness, or even stupidity, of the person for whom it’s intended. Didn’t I already say I’m still a kid? So even if I’m wrong about the forcelessness of revelation, tell me, who’s more set in her ways than a kid? Who takes more convincing? Anyway, the point is, it’s always one belief looking to take over another belief. That’s the reason for the hard, though forceless, sell, the constant repetition. That’s the reason they kept coming at me from all sides, the reason it was always a little like Rush Week.

(So let the record show, and let me begin by laying to rest, some misconceptions.

(Ready?

(Divine agency does not work through the medium of barely legible images showing through certain kinds of paint in certain lights at certain times of day. It doesn’t rub itself into the warp and woof of cloth. The Shroud of Turin, for example, is no Polaroid of Jesus. I showed Holy Mother a picture from a magazine and asked her directly. You know what she said? “What, my Jesus? How do people come up with such mishegoss? This fella? Where’s the resemblance? This isn’t Jesus, this is just some stubby little gypsy.”

(And statues of saints neither weep nor bleed. They don’t wink or perspire or pull a long face. They never move their lips or open their mouths to speak. God doesn’t use ventriloquists’ dummies to make His points. Neither does He rely on Nature. Oh, He splits the Red Sea if there’s a need, or throws a Flood, but in the piecemeal One-on-one of a conversion He doesn’t like to disturb the topography. He’ll hesitate to pull a river from a rock, say, or lay down an instant copse of trees onto the barren earth like you’d put up a fence.

(Holy Mother explained this, too. “He doesn’t like to scare you. He’s very gentle. Didn’t He send the Angel Gabriel to explain what was going to happen to me? And, after it happened, after the Lord had already been with me and I’d begun to show so people could see, didn’t I concentrate and study on it as hard as I ever concentrated or studied on anything in my life to try to figure out just when it could have happened, and all I could ever come up with was just this thin memory I had of a draft I happened to be sitting in when I was sewing a few garments together one time for my dowry after Joseph and I were already betrothed. So He’s gentle. Whatever else He is, He’s gentle. Even though He’s only ever satisfied when His arrangements uproot and change the world!”

(No. The last thing that bunch is is shy. Gentle, yes, but persistent. They have something on their mind they let you know about it and don’t nod at you from the woodwork or send you signals from the plaster of Paris. I’ll tell you what they’re like — Scrooge’s ghosts.)

My first visitor was a young woman who looked to be maybe seventeen or eighteen years old. At first glance she could have been my older sister. Holy Mother introduced us.

“Hi.”

“Hi,” St. Myra Weiss said.

“St. Myra Weiss?”

“I thought so too,” I told Mr. Rockers. “I was really surprised. She looked too preppy to be a saint. But Holy Mother vouched for her. She must have been legit.”

“Go on.”

“She was the patron saint of kids whose dads get transferred and have to relocate in a different city.”

“Wait a minute,” the attorney said.

“I know. I was surprised myself,” I told him. “When she said what her job was I looked right at Holy Mother and rolled my eyes. I think I offended her. St. Myra. She got kind of defensive.”

“Not army brats.”

“Beg pardon?” I said.

“Someone else handles army brats. St. Captain Ralph R. Sweeney.”

“Hold it right there, young lady. Do I have to remind you that this is a deposition and that you’re under oath?”

“I know that. Don’t you think I know that? Don’t you think I know how ridiculous this is going to make me look when it gets out? I know all that. Did I make it snow? Did I lower the temperature so everything would freeze and they’d have to declare a snow day at the exact time Holy Mother was going to be in my neighborhood and practically guarantee that we’d run into each other? I didn’t do that stuff. What do you want from me? It’s God’s plan.”

“All right, Connie, that’s all right. Calm down. You can calm down now. Here’s a Kleenex. All right, you’ve got your own hankie. That’s fine.”

She was the patron saint of kids whose dads get transferred and have to relocate in a different city.

I told her in that case I thought she might have the wrong party.

“Aren’t you Jerry Goldkorn’s daughter?”

“That’s right.”

“I have the right party.”

Her father was an executive in Coca-Cola Bottling’s corporate headquarters down in Atlanta, Georgia. St. Myra was born there. “I was a Georgia peach,” she told me, smiling, looking down. “It’s true, I was. A Georgia peach. Oh, I loved Atlanta, loved my friends, our life there. Loved our club. You know my parents had to bribe me to get me to agree to go off with them to Europe in the summers? They promised that after I graduated high school I wouldn’t have to go East to college, or any further away from Atlanta than Agnes Scott College for Women in Decatur.

“I was as happy with my lot as any sixteen-year-old girl in America. Because I was best friends with nineteen dozen other kids just like me. Who were as happy with theirs. Who had the same credit cards for the same malls and department stores, who got the same clothing allowances and took their lessons from the same piano and ballet and figure-skating teachers and worked out at the same fitness centers and had children-of-paid-up members’ privileges at the same country clubs. Who went to the same humongous open parties on weekends in each others’ houses when our parents were out of town and then went on to meet at the same fast-food drive-ins when the parties got busted at midnight. Who got our learner’s permits at the same time, and our licenses, and, by default, the same second or third or fourth family car, till we’d get, for graduation, or some special birthday, the same cute red or yellow convertible of our very own and who couldn’t wait to be yuppies!”

“But you said you—”

“I am. I’m telling you. The patron saint of kids whose dads get transferred and have to relocate in a different city. It’s just that I was always such a good sport.

“Daddy called me in in the summer of my seventeenth year when I was on the cusp of my junior year in high school.

“ ‘Coca-Cola’s just bought out this blockbuster diet soft drink company in the Midwest, sweetheart, and they want your dad to head it up. Now I know, I know, the only home you’ve ever known has been right here in Atlanta, and that you’re very happy here, and that it’s a little unfair to ask you to leave your friends, and normally, well, normally, darn it, I wouldn’t think of asking you to make that sort of sacrifice, but the soft-drink business is entering a new phase. It’s expanding and changing right before our eyes, and if we don’t expand and stretch and change right along with it, well, sir, we’re going to be left at the starting gate and there won’t be any money for balls and country clubs and Junior League revels. I’m not asking now. I have too much respect for you for that. I’m requesting. If you say no then it’s no, and you and Mummy and Bubba and me will just have to stay put right where we are. If it were your senior year rather than the junior year you’re entering I wouldn’t even be requesting, or inquiring either for that matter, but as I see it you’ll have two whole years to settle in and put your life together and get yourself a gang as close to the one you have here in Atlanta as, given the demographics, you can get in Milwaukee.’