Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

“What’s that? What’s that smell?”

“It’s all right, Counselor, he’s had an accident. Mr. Hershorn? Mr. Hershorn, it’s Connie. That’s all right, no harm done, you’ve had a little accident, Mr. Hershorn. I’ll have you cleaned up in a jiffy.”

Then I interrupted my deposition and asked Counselor Rockers where the rest room was. I excused myself and led Mr. Hershorn off to make him more comfortable.

While Mr. Hershorn and I were in the washroom, Holy Mother appeared to me one more time. She watched what I was doing without saying anything. Then she said I would probably be a saint myself one day. When I asked of what, she just shrugged and said she didn’t really know but possibly of incontinent old men, and when I told her that didn’t sound like such a hot job to me, she allowed as how that might be so but that somebody had to do it.

This is the sworn deposition of Constance Ruth Goldkorn of 336 Main, Lud, New Jersey 07642. Present in attendance were Elizabeth Packer, 1143 Hapthorn St., East Orange, New Jersey 07019, Certified Court Reporter and Notary Public within and for the Township of Lud, New Jersey; Christopher Rockers, lawyer of 4 Rosewood Ct., Passaic Park, New Jersey 07055, and Robert Hershorn of the Hershorn Monument Company, 105 Main, Lud, New Jersey 07642.

This deposition is for immediate release to all northern New Jersey newspapers, TV and radio stations, school districts, synagogues, churches, hospitals, funeral directors and to the Archbishop of the Archdiocese of Newark.

D on’t think I don’t know what’s going on!” I shouted at her. “I know what’s going on! Oh, boy, do I know what’s going on! I know what’s going on better than you do!

“You’re looking to discredit me. You’re looking to get me fired. Always the short view. Always the short view, hey, Connie? Go, run to the bishops, run to the papers. Go run right up to Elaine Iglauer herself, looking in Fairlawn, looking in Ridgewood for a house for us while you’re out there playing in the street with Holy Mother! Ha!

“Well, my friend, you ought to know just a leetle bit more about your religion before you go barking up that tree! We’re this Sins of the Fathers people visited even unto the third and fourth generations. Where is it written, you tell me, where does it speak anywhere in Torah about the Sins of the Daughters ? Can you answer me that, Buster Brown? No! Because it doesn’t work that way. It ain’t any two-way street we ride past each other with the windows rolled and the top down flipping hexes and trading calumnies.

“So I know what you’re doing, little missy.

“You’re not afraid of any ghosts. You’re looking to drive a wedge. Why don’t you own up? You think you can trade your meshuggina mishegoss for your old mother’s. Bingo bango! Moishe Kapoyr! Moses reversed! But what you don’t understand, my fine-feathered friend, is that husbands and wives cleave. I’m a cleaver, kiddo. So’s Mummy. We’re the whither-thou-thither-me chosen people, your mother and I. The Bible tells us so. Go,” I told her, “you can look it up!”

I TELL YOU, it was like a siege those first few days. We couldn’t leave the house to buy groceries without having some reporter jump out from behind the bushes, or paparazzi we couldn’t even see take our picture through a telescopic lens a mile and a half off. Once a guy waited for us in the driveway, sitting in our own car. They were after us. We were scoops and exclusives waiting to happen. All I ever gave them, however, was my silence, never even the brisk “No comment”—that sounds so defensive — they’d have been all too pleased to run.

The phone rang off the hook with people not so much requesting interviews as demanding them. And not just major papers but the free community papers too, sunny neighborhood weeklies up on the lawn with their ads and deep coverage of girls’ public league basketball. There were calls from a couple of national tabloids that wanted to buy our story. And not just the papers, radio stations too, TV stations Connie’d alerted, and the networks it hadn’t even occurred to her might be interested. Everyone itching to bounce us off his satellite and offering to wring our images through his fiber optics. The rabbi, they promised, wouldn’t even have to leave the comfort of his study. They’d come turn it into this hi-tech mini-TV studio and he could just sit there hugging a couple of Torahs or maybe poring over the Dead Sea Scrolls with a jeweler’s loupe hanging out one eye like a long black tear. If we switched to an unpublished number, inside an hour they would crack the code and the phone was ringing off the hook again.

Shelley, God bless her, was a little soldier. She didn’t give them any more satisfaction than I did. She’d step outside to put out the garbage and they’d pop up, materialized all over her with all the breezy clarity and force of Holy Mother herself, poking their tape recorders and microphones under her nose and shouting questions into her face as if she were a candidate for high office or someone under indictment. “No comment,” she’d tell them, smiling, holding her humor. “No comment, thank you, gentlemen,” she’d say, slyly, as if it was a joke they shared. I think she liked it. Her “no comment’s” spoke volumes.

But I’ll tell you the truth, it wasn’t my wife they were interested in, or even our daughter. It was me, my rabbi’s opinions they sought. Looking, the momzers, to stir a little trouble between the Judaeos and the Christians. Though I have to admit, not all the phone calls were for me. Some were for Connie from incontinent old men. “Connie’s not here,” I told them. “She’s still alive,” I said, “call back when she’s dead.”

I tried to contact the Archbishop of Newark. He wouldn’t take my calls. Neither would Shull, neither did Tober. School was supposed to open in a few weeks and Shelley started to phone up some of the mothers in the car pool. They thanked her and said other arrangements had been made.

And suddenly I’m thinking: This is bad, this is just compounding the problem. Our silence hasn’t done us any more good than Connie going public in the first place. And it occurred to me that while I still had their attention (which was beginning, I’d noticed, to slack off), I ought to agree to an interview, or at least try to get a statement together which, without airing all our daughter’s problems in public, might, one, put forward the notion that a lot of this was just kids-will-be-kids, or, two, at least put Connie’s extravagant bobbe myseh into perspective. It was a problem of dignity, it was a question of taste. I threw out any idea of appearing on television or going on one of those radio phone-in talk shows. No, I thought, we were the people of the Book. The Word was precious to us. I would go to the papers.

Dismissing the idea of a hoax — I didn’t want it to seem that Connie had played a joke on the Christians — I rehearsed a carefully worded, balanced, entirely neutral account of what might be any teenage girl’s motivations for inventing the events my daughter described in her deposition.

“Excuse me, Rabbi,” said the man from the Newark Star-Ledger, “are you saying she made it all up? That Connie doesn’t believe she saw those saints?”

“Of course not.”

“What about Holy Mother? Does she believe she saw the Virgin?”

“She doesn’t even believe there is a Virgin.”

They ran the story in their Saturday edition on the religion page under a picture of Connie and an even larger one of me. Mostly it was background information — which I’d supplied — about our life in Lud, accompanied by a rather sensationalized restatement of my daughter’s original claims, everything topped off with a cunningly placed, incredibly damaging “No comment!” taken out of context and attributed to me.