Stanley Elkin - The Rabbi of Lud

“Shelley, I’m so sorry,” I said. And I was, and cursed my lousy timing and wondered how I could have allowed them to beat me to the punch and why it had never occurred to me that Joan Cohen would ever share Rutherford with anyone. Meanwhile thinking, the sons of bitches. Thinking, kiss and tell, kiss and tell. Thinking, base kissers; thinking, base tale bearers. “Shelley,” I said, emotionally toed-in as a child, “if there was anything I could do …”

“I know,” she said, and laid her hand on my arm. “Elaine would have been with her. It was only because we had this appointment.”

“I’m sorry?”

“To look at the house. In Oakland. Because the agent who normally shows it had to be somewhere else. So she let Elaine have the key. Well, they know her. Well, they do so much business. Or Elaine might have been killed too.”

“Killed?”

“Yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

“Killed?”

“If Elaine hadn’t already promised to go with me after I dropped Connie off at school.”

“Killed?”

“Sure,” Shelley said. “That’s why she had to tell her no when Joan invited her. Because we already had this appointment to look at the house.”

“Invited her.”

“To go walking,” she said. “In the woods. Near the lake. She wanted to try out her new boots. Elaine saw them. She said they were gorgeous, that they looked beautiful with that new fawn skirt she was wearing. She would have gone, too. Such a lovely, crisp day. After all this rotten weather we’ve been having. Elaine Iglauer says I saved her life.”

“Killed? Joan Cohen?”

“Yes,” Shelley moaned, “isn’t that what I’ve been saying?”

“Who killed her?”

An image of Bubbles came into my head, twenty dollars’ worth of manicure clutching a hand mirror, examining his face, the blood Sal had brought up.

“Rangers found casings,” she said. “They think it was a hunter. They think it was a hunting accident.”

Sure, I thought, of course. What else? A hunting accident. Do ye ken Joan Cohen? It was hunters jumping the season must have bagged her.

IT FELL TO ME to do the honors.

All these years in the business and — touch wood — there’d never been anything personal before. No one — thank God — had died on me. (Well, there was my little stillborn boy, but he didn’t even have a name, and we didn’t have the koyach to bury him.) What I’m saying is that, well, for me, kayn aynhoreh, it had all been in the rabbi mode. Not that any man’s death doesn’t diminish me too. Sure it does. It does. If a clod be washed away by the sea, isn’t Jersey the less? This is a given. Still, there’s loss and there’s loss, there’s death and there’s death.

They came the same bright, crisp afternoon of the day she was shot, Fanny Tupperman and Miriam Perloff, and assured me they spoke for the surviving Chaverot, for Sylvia Simon and Elaine Iglauer, for Rose Pickler and Naomi Shore, even, they said, for Shelley.

“My,” I told them, “such a vote of confidence, but surely, wouldn’t it be better if her own rabbi performed the service?”

“You were her rabbi,” Fanny Tupperman said.

“What’s Judaism coming to?” I deplored. “No one belongs to a temple nowadays? I was her rabbi? I was? I rabbi the dead. I minister the fallen away, the caught out and caught short in New Jersey.”

“That’s Joan all right,” Fanny Tupperman said.

“I don’t know,” I said, “if I’m up to it. A grotesque, off-season hunting accident. Listen, I’m still in shock.”

I was. I was a draikopf, and couldn’t keep it straight who knew what and when they knew it. I was her rabbi, singing Fanny Tupperman had enigmatically piped. Plus there was the truly false light into which I would be plunging my wife, and daughter, too, for that matter, who would probably take a day off from school and martyrdom to hear the family’s other religious, her dad, recite his holy bygones-be-bygones above Joan Cohen’s gamy remains. A tall order for a guy who for most of his professional life had tried to maintain a low profile. Plus the fact of my own real, adulterous, grief. Which was unresolved and would make, along with the visions I continued to access in my head of Joan Cohen’s doelike leaps to errant, risky freedom, all that tragic dodge and cut-and-run (because surely she would have picked up his scent even before he — the killer poacher, man-eating, deer-stalker hunter — would have picked up the visual equivalent of hers — that quick tweed movement in the field, that flash of leather boot or hoof), any words of mine of no avail, of never any glimmer of avail. (Who would still think “doomed” the moment I remembered the moment she proposed to Elaine Iglauer that they go walking in the woods. And still ask God-God! — “What would a woman like this be doing out on a day like that anyway? Tell me, what could You have been thinking of?” Or scold, scold her memory. “Running such risks! Practically inviting every trigger-happy, redneck, rifle-bearing yahoo in this neck of the woods to take a potshot at you! You were asking for it. You almost deserve to have been killed!”)

I tried to tell them I was the wrong man for the job and marshaled all the fool-for-a-client arguments I could think of. They looked at me closely. “It’s just that I knew her,” I told them lamely. “I couldn’t be objective.”

“Those other times,” Fanny Tupperman said, “those were objective funerals?”

Shelley asked me to do it. “If not for me, then for Joan Cohen. She’d have wanted it that way.”

“Boy,” I said, “every Tom, Dick and Harry knows what dead people have in their heads, what they’ve got up their sleeves and would get off their chests. Why do they draw up wills? What do we need lawyers?”

“Jerry,” Shull confided, “I’m picking up the expenses on this one. The deluxe mahogany. Down stuffing in the satin lining. I’m going all out.”

“What, you are?”

“My pleasure,” he said.

“Your pleasure? That’s very kind, Sam.”

“No, no, you don’t understand. My pleasure. I dated her.”

“I see,” I said.

“Twenty grand I must have spent on that woman. At least twenty grand. I was the one who put her into all those suedes and Harris tweeds she wore. The tiny pinstripes. I dressed her for success. What the hell? What’s a few thousand more? Still, well, you know, if we had to bring in another rabbi …”

That she’d never married. That she left no survivors. That was the angle I meant to punch up. Working her childlessness, working her spinsterhood, working the theme we were all her survivors.

Her singing. I’d bring in her singing. Her musical Judaism. And sketch her, powerfully clapping, bounding round the campfire, draw her generous kibbutz heart. A cheerful, reliable, companionable sort, her soul in the backpack with the provisions. This echt Sabra, some maiden Jewess, say, who might have been there with Moses on the long voyage out from Egypt to the Promised Land. Some slim, dark au pair of the wilderness who kept an eye on the kids and helped with the tents. Though this, of course, was not how I really saw her. (Oh, how I really saw her! Never mind how I really saw her!) Though you know? In a way I did.

Her good-sport mode, I mean, and elegant outdoor ways. Which got her killed for her trouble, slaughtered for her style. And led her out into the very fields and locales where models posed for their pictures, out into the unfenced surreal, that deer-stalked, fox-hunted, cony-catchered bluegrass where you could almost have anticipated the sniper would be.