Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

“It was the most disagreeable decision I ever had to make. I assented at once, of course, and even made out that I was getting a little tired of Atlanta anyway and actually looked forward to the move.”

“But you loved Atlanta.”

“A patron saint of kids whose dads get transferred and relocate in a different city must be as devoted to her father as she is to that generation of children for whom she is the earnest, supplicatory object of appeal.”

“I see.”

“Milwaukee was a disaster.”

“You couldn’t duplicate—?”

“Kids our age are a demographics unto ourselves. Of course there was to be had in Milwaukee what was to be had in Atlanta. Doesn’t Milwaukee have malls and country clubs, doesn’t it have roadsters and fitness centers, the children of the CEO classes, credit cards, cotillions, open-invitationed weekend bashes by the pool when the folks leave town for a few days? Doesn’t it have fast-food hangouts and not only those places you can go to for a fake ID, but those other places you can go to where they will be honored? Of course there is to be duplicated in Milwaukee anything that had already been imprinted upon you in Atlanta.”

“Then what’s the big deal?”

“Because I was a Georgia peach. Because when I opened my mouth to speak they laughed and called me names and said, ‘Hey, get her, she talks like a nigger.’

“Because they always think they have to draw a line somewhere, so they draw it around you, or around themselves in some tight-knit, gerrymandered circle. Because there’s always this eleventh-hour, last-ditch, last-minute exclusivity among any given nineteen dozen best friends, Atlanta, Milwaukee, New Orleans or Paris, France, either.”

“Tell how they martyred you, dear.”

“They martyred me by pretending to capitulate, Holy Mother.”

“They betrayed you.”

“Yes, ma’am. I was invited to one of those Friday or Saturday night parties that they didn’t have to bother to invite anyone else to because no one else ever even had to be invited. One of them called out to me after our ten o’clock French class.

“ ‘Myra. Myra Weiss. Myra, hold up.’

“ ‘Chapters eleven and twelve,’ I told her. ‘Mademoiselle says we’re responsible for the subjunctive and all the idioms with “coup” in them.’

“ ‘No,’ she said, ‘not that.’

“ ‘Monday. The quiz is Monday.’

“ ‘Not that either, silly. I know when the quiz is. Clyde Carlin’s folks are going out of town this weekend. He’s throwing a party. Around nineish.’

“ ‘I know that.’

“ ‘He wants you to come.’

“ ‘He does?’

“ ‘He asked me to invite you, didn’t he?’ ”

But when she showed up at Clyde Carlin’s house that Friday at around nine she didn’t see any cars in the driveway, though all the lights seemed to be on on the first floor. St. Myra could have kicked herself for coming so early. In Atlanta, too, these things never started on time. “Well,” she told herself, “somebody’s got to be first,” parked her car, and went up to the door and pulled on the bell.

Clyde Carlin’s little brother, Ben, opened the door.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” she said, “I’m Myra. Your brother asked me to come to his party.”

“Myra Weiss?” Ben said.

“That’s right.”

“I’m Ben,” Ben said, “Clyde’s brother. Clyde told me to tell you that our parents changed their plans and didn’t go out of town this weekend after all, and that our party’s called off but Suzy Locke-Miller is having one at her house instead.”

He gave her Susan’s address and precise instructions how to get there. She knew something was wrong, but it was already the middle of the spring semester, nine months since they’d moved up from Atlanta, and this was the first time they’d ever even seemed to open their ranks for her. She couldn’t take the chance. So she took the carefully drawn map Clyde had left with Ben to give to her and started out for Suzy Locke-Miller’s.

Where the same thing happened. Only this time it was an older sister who came to the door.

“Yes? What is it?”

“Does Suzy Locke-Miller live here?”

“Who wants to know?”

“I’m Myra Weiss.”

“Sooz went off to a par — Weiss? Hold on a minute, she left a note.”

And left the girl in the hall and went off to find it. It was so apparently hurried and scribbled it might almost have been what it purported to be, a hastily written apology, an explanation Myra couldn’t quite follow saying there’d been a change in plans, that the party had been moved again and that Myra must come to Franklin Bradbury’s house. She gave the address, and directions how to get there, and even put down a number Myra could call should she get lost.

She knew what was what now. What they were doing to her. But she kept on going anyway. She had to. Because she was into her martyrdom now, she said. She was on this scavenger hunt for her martyrdom. At one house it was the parents themselves who sent her on to the next place where the putative party was supposedly being held.

She drove from house to house, really seeing Milwaukee for the first time, reminded, in those pricey suburbs, how much like Atlanta it was after all.

It was when she was on her way to the seventh or eighth house that she became momentarily blinded by her own tears and missed the curve and swerved off the winding street and ran into a tree on the lawn of the very house where, ironically, the party they had been hiding from her actually was going on. It was Clyde Carlin himself who heard the crash and was the first on the scene. When he saw what had happened and who it was it had happened to, it took his breath away. The girl from French class came running up to him.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” she said.

“Don’t look,” Clyde said.

“No,” she said, “what?”

“Great goddamn,” Clyde said, “it’s the nigger. It’s that Myra. She’s gone and crashed the damned party!”

“But that’s not my problem,” I told St. Myra. “My father wasn’t transferred, he hasn’t relocated in a different city.”

“It’s still a question of being lost where one is,” St. Myra Weiss said; “Of becoming separated, locked from some Palestine of the heart’s desiring. You’re already relocated. I’m your man.”

So she sold me a candle.

“She sold you a candle? She did?”

“It’s how they live. You take money for depositions, don’t you? It’s how you live.”

“Go on.”

There’s not a whole lot more to tell. More saints came marching in. Holy Mother thought we should become better acquainted. So both sides would know what they were dealing with. It’s pretty specialized. More than a Jewish girl raised on the notion of Moses and monotheism would have guessed. I told Holy Mother.

“Land sakes, child, is that what you think? That God doesn’t have helpers, that He’s this Workaholic Who thinks He has to do everything Himself or nothing would ever get done? No, hon, that’s not what He’s like at all. He don’t only love us, He trusts us.”

She must have brought on more than a dozen. They just kept coming. Before I knew it I’d run out of money to buy their candles from them, but they kept coming anyway. Saints of shopping for a birthday present when you’ve been invited to a party at the last minute and the stores are all closed. Saints for throwing an outfit together when either they’ve seen everything you have, or what they haven’t seen is at the cleaner’s and you’ve got nothing to wear. Acne saints. Saints for your period. Saints of the S.A.T.’s and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory tests. Saints for split ends, for limp or oily hair. Brittle nails saints. Saints for putting in your contact lenses, or finding them again when they pop out in the grass.