Stanley Elkin: The Rabbi of Lud

“So what about you?” I asked. “How is it a girl like you never got married?”

“You sound like my parents.”

“How is it?”

“Maybe I’m just waiting for the right man to come along.”

And stick in here about her character, her qualities and virtues. Her righteous probity and defense against temptation as if she were protected by fire retardant, or Scotch-Gard, say. Her loyalty, for example. What she said next. “Not you ,” she flashed. “Shelley’s my friend. She’s only your wife.”

I could tell them I underestimated her, and go on, pushing the landmarks and saliencies, the highlights and points of interest, putting her together, too like a police-artist’s sketch.

“Did you misunderstand me? Oh, you misunderstood me,” I objected. “No, I’m just curious. A nice Jewish girl. Intelligent, attractive. It just seems to me that someone like you would have no difficulty meeting fellows. Perhaps at your temple. In your job where you work. I’m told that sometimes, if you take your wash to the laundromat …”

“Oh, I meet plenty of men,” she said. “That’s not the problem. Last night.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Last night. After the ceremony. After the dinner. During the dancing.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It was so stuffy. I was all overheated.”

“Yes?”

“I needed some air.”

“Some air. Yes?”

“So I came down here.”

“Down here.”

“Well, I was on my way out.”

“Outside you mean.”

“Yes, out. Outside for fresh air.”

“I see.”

“I was crossing the lobby and got as far as that bar, and suddenly there was this Japanese man. He was quite good-looking. And, well, he hit on me.”

“He hit on you?”

“Well, it was no big deal. He asked if I wanted to have a drink with him.”

“You’d gone into the bar?”

“No,” she said, “I was crossing the lobby, I was going out for some air. He saw me crossing the lobby. He was in town on business, I guess. He was alone. I mean, he wasn’t with anyone. Colleagues or customers, a woman, a friend.”

“He just asked if you wanted to have a drink with him.”

“That’s right.”

“Just like that.”

“Yes.”

“So what did you tell him?”

“Well, I’m afraid I wasn’t very nice.”

“I can’t believe that.”

“I said, ‘How come the sport coats you guys wear always have all those lines and bars and look like blowups of a computer chip?’ ”

“Goodness,” I said, “that was a little rude. It was sort of a racial slur, wasn’t it? What did he say then?”

“He was hurt, but I made it up to him,” she said. “I bought him a drink. Then, afterward, I took him up to the room.”

“Oh?” I said. “Yes?”

“I didn’t go outside after all.”

“So you never did get your fresh air.”

“We opened the windows.”

I would tell them … And just then remembered. Her parents. She’d mentioned her parents. They would be there. That’s it, I decided. And destroyed my notes. Just ripped them up. Just threw them away. All my notes. Toward my eulogy for Joan Cohen.

And decided to play it straight.

The place was packed. Joan Cohen’s bewildered parents sat in the front by themselves, rent strips of grosgrain pinned to their clothing like black campaign ribbons. The Chaverot were there, their Chaverot husbands and children. Musicians I recognized from bands that had played at their affairs. People I’d never seen in my life.

I read selected passages. I read “O woman of valor who can find?” from Proverbs. I read the twenty-third psalm. I did other selected passages while Shull’s and Tober’s people set up additional chairs for the latecomers. I did “I lift up mine eyes unto the hills” and “Praise Him with the sound of the trumpet; praise Him with the psaltery and harp.”

Then, scanning the faces of the mourners — Shelley glared; Connie, seated beside Hershorn, was openly snarling — I waited until the last seat was taken, and began.

“Joan Cohen never married,” I said. “Raised in the values of the traditional Jewish family, she never chose to indulge herself as a ‘single parent,’ and so remained childless. Save for her beloved parents, of course — and it’s typical of Joan how, as a good daughter, she was ever conscious of her mother’s and father’s worries for her (incidentally, one of my fondest memories of Joan is how once, in Philadelphia, she confided in me as her rabbi and spoke of exactly this subject — their concern that she meet Mr. Right, settle down, and make a good Jewish home) — she may be said to have left no survivors.

“Yet there are so many here. How crowded it is! Additional chairs have been set up to accommodate the overflow. And still people stand at the back of the chapel and along its walls. So many, so very many, heedless of ordinance, in defiance of the safety codes, willing to put themselves at risk! Why? In order to pay Joan our last respects? A childless, single woman who never married and left as survivors only her grieving mother and heartbroken father? So many? So much respect?”

Shull was weeping. (What this must do to his pleasure, I thought absently. How it must play hell with it. How many thousands it will cost him just to break even again.)

“As you know, Joan was a talented musician. Her group was called ‘Chaverot,’ Hebrew for ‘fellowship,’ and what a jolly good fellowship it was! I see her fellows in the fellowship here. I see other musicians, bandsmen whose privilege it may once have been to accompany Joan.

“But can you all be musicians? And who are we talking about here anyway? A Beverly Sills? A Barbra Streisand? An Eydie Gorme?

“Of course not.

“We’re talking about someone barely and scantly professional, who made, in the psalmist’s inspired words, her ‘joyful noise unto the Lord,’ and who praised Him not ‘with the sound of the trumpet,’ nor ‘with the psaltery and harp,’ nor ‘with the timbrel.’ Well, maybe with the timbrel, that’s like a tambourine. But not ‘stringed instruments and organs.’ Nor ‘upon the loud cymbals,’ either. So, with the possible exception of the timbrel, what was Joan’s instrument? Her person that she went to so much trouble to keep kempt and was always such a pleasure to look upon, if only to watch the fall fashions that she preferred and never seemed to tire of wearing, as if autumn were her season of choice, like a winter snow scene, say, kept in a crystal? Was it her style, then, that was her instrument? Her elegant outdoor ways? Which led her into the very fields and unfenced vastnesses where the deer stalker and fox hunter and cony catcher wait for their prey?

“Or was it some cheerful, heady exuberance we caught from her when she raised up her voice in song? That powerful clapping I can almost hear now? Was it some sense we had of her bounding ’round a campfire, leading the singing from the bottom of her generous kibbutz heart? Because she had the energy of a counselor in summer camp and could have been this echt Sabra, a maiden worthy of having been there in the days of Moses, pitching in, helping out, this slim, dark au pair of the wilderness.

“But so many?”

I’ve never been particularly proud of what I do. I do it well, I think, and give fair measure. But, as I say, I’m this professional comforter, like one of those who tried to talk Job out of his grievances and, as on occasions like this, often too much in the rabbi mode. Practically speaking, I’m an unmoved mover. Today, though, even I was a little moved. (What the hell, I knew her, Horatio.)

Most of them were weeping now. Tober’s son, dapper behind opaque glasses, wept blind tears. (Sure, I thought, she taught him to dress.) Anyway, most of them were weeping. It was no time to let up.