Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

“Cousin Diane told him.”

“So,” I said. “Your cousin found out what you did. Sure,” I said, “Larry’s big brother. He’s the one who told Larry, Marvin’s friend.”

“She’s not my real cousin.”

“Larry told Diane about your boyfriend.” I was tired now. A seance really takes it out of you.

“He’s not my real boyfriend,” Connie said. “He told her himself.”

“Oh, Connie,” Shelley said. “Oh, my poor dear Connie. Do something, Jerry. Can’t you see her heart is breaking?”

Do something? Do something what? My daughter was stretched across her mother’s lap, the two of them composed like the little Pietà of Connie’s deposition, Shelley stroking Connie’s madeover, layered hair and crooning her There-theres and consolations.

“That’s right,” she comforted, “it doesn’t. It doesn’t run smooth. Of course not. Not for anyone. How wise you are. Isn’t she, Jerry? Isn’t she wise? How proud we are, sweetheart. What a level-headed heart you have on your shoulders! Such a love detective! Isn’t she, Jerry?”

“Sure is.”

“To have learned what you’ve learned? At fourteen? And to have found out our secret? Your father’s and mine? Not back in the house an hour and you discover we’re not sleeping together anymore. That Mother moved into the spare bedroom the minute you left. Wasn’t that clever of her? Wasn’t it, Jerry?”

“Absolutely.”

“Yes,” Shelley said. “And we thought we could fool her.”

“No way.”

“Well, tell her,” said Shelley.

“Hey,” I said, at once exhausted and as suddenly and frightfully free as a man who has just been in a stupid and devastating accident, “we’re happy to have you back in our funny little town where death drags down the neighborhood and kicks shit out of the property values.”

“Really?” Connie said.

“Hell, yes,” I told her, “cherry or no cherry, we’re just pleased as all get-out to have you back where you belong.”

BUT NO, I had to end it on a sour note. No sense of timing, when to get out. If I’d — so to speak — turned off the lights when she got to the part about the real uncle, real cousin, real boyfriend business, we could all have kissed and made up. Even if we’d brought down the curtain when the big lummox, all tragic and cozy, was crawling up and down my wife’s lap, we might still have been able to bring it off, music, swelling, up and out. But no, I had to hit the kid with my cherry-or-no-cherry speech. I just don’t know when to get out. Or where I get off.

So instead of all is forgiven, nothing was. Shelley huffed and puffed, fussed and bothered, preening her car-pool temperament and conscientiousness like nobody’s business. The very picture of a mother right down to the last detail. As, before Connie came along, she’d been the very picture of the brand-new bride and, after, the perfect picture of a wife and lover. Or, throughout, had the rebbitzin, if not letter-perfect — I never said Shelley was letter-perfect — down pat, at least in the sensibilities. And, as now, she had become some vehicle of born-again reproach to me. We didn’t sleep together. Oh, we shared the same room, even the same bed, but we might, absent and yearning, have been in different cities. It wasn’t even as if she felt a sexual antipathy toward me. (I know my Shelley.) No, this was the judgment of the court. She was serving time, waiting until the next down-to-the-last-detail down-pat picture came to her.

Connie, God bless her, harassed me with attitude while she — I thought — thought up new ways to go public. I asked if she meant to run away again, and she said, “Where would I go?” Sealing the ménage. Locking us, forever could be, into her tight, airless little game plan.

And me? What about me, the Rabbi of Lud?

Well, to tell the truth, I was in love at the time and couldn’t be bothered. I don’t know, maybe it was my problems at home made it happen, one of those cause-and-effect, chicken-or-egg deals that make you crazy trying to fathom. Connie had already revealed God’s plan for her in the scheme of things, split Lud, and sent Shelley off packing into the spare bedroom with her jewels and lucky porcelain, so I was probably already half a goner anyway when I ran into one of my wife’s singing sisters in the hospitality suite of a nearby Best Western when I was working the interment circuit for Klein and Charney. Of all the musical Jews, God knows she was the one I’d always found the most attractive.

It was Joan Cohen, the one who shopped. The tall, elegant Chaverot in the suedes and knits who, in her wool autumnals and graduated rusts and yellows, looked like camouflage, and seemed, as I’ve said, some quick tweed movement in a field, fashionably earthen as a saddle or the burnished stock of a rifle, a step from blood sport. She could have been poster lady for the National Rifle Association. Joan Cohen was like moonlight in Vermont, autumn in New York.

Oh, oh, Joan, Joan, it wasn’t just the leaves you set ablaze when you stepped up to fill the brisk fall air with your smoky, musky chlorophyll, but whole heaped piles of my heart. You were aristocratic and as full of gorgeous, solid presence as some handsome, tweedy lady sensibly shod. Foxy Joan Cohen, do ye ken John Peel?

I don’t know, she made me feel, well, Church of England, as though I had a “living,” two hundred a year, say, like some curate in a country parish on a great estate in a novel. Jerry Goldkorn, Rabbi of Dorchester House. Well-met we were in that Rutherford, New Jersey, Best Western.

“Yoicks! Is that Joan Cohen?”

“Rabbi, it is,” she said. “Shalom.”

“Hail! Halloo! What cheer?”

“I read about your Connie in the papers.”

“My,” I said, “what a beautiful sweater. Shetland, is it?”

“Kids,” she said, “go figure them. A bunch of nudniks.”

“Lightweight, but I should think it keeps one quite cozy astride a good, strong jumper taking the hurdles and hedges of a brisk morning.”

“They haven’t any sachel.”

“Would it also come in a herringbone jacket, do you suppose?”

“All chutzpa and shpilkes.”

“Pinched at the waist and flared at the hips? With little leather patches at the elbows?”

“To say such awful things? To strangers? A shanda! What? No,” she said, “I haven’t seen it in herringbone.”

She was there, she told me, to check out the acoustics for the Nathan Nizer bar mitzvah. She’d heard I was selling graveyard properties and happened to have seen my name on the special events board in the lobby. Was my seminar over already?

“No, no. It doesn’t start till seven.”

“It’s twenty to eight.”

“Sometimes they’re a little late.”

“Oh?”

“Sometimes they don’t show up.”

“Oh,” Joan Cohen said.

“I give them a couple of hours.”

“Oh.”

“Then I’m out of here.”

“I see.”

“Oh, yes. Two hours. Then I’m history.”

“Are those brochures?”

“Hmn?”

“On those chairs you set up. Are they brochures?”

“Well, yes, in a way they’re brochures. They’re cemetery plats. They describe the services we provide. The different perpetual care options you can choose from. The legal height you can have your monument. Examples of the sort of thing we do. What, would you care to see one?”

“Oh, yes, please. May I?”

“I don’t see why not.”

She took a piece of literature up off one of the empty chairs and appeared to study it.

“Well,” I said, “what do you think?”

“It’s very interesting,” Joan Cohen said. “I like Plan D. Creeping euonymous is my favorite ground cover. I love a dark, shiny leaf. And it’s green all winter. It never drops off.”