Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet (4 page)

He poured the dry cereal into the bowl and added milk.

“A couple of eggs, Arnold? I can make them so you could eat them from the shell, that would be all right, wouldn’t it? And a cup of coffee. If you want. I could give it to you in a glass.”

“Sure, Ma, that’ll be fine.”

“All your meals you can take here. If you’re worried about my pots and pans, I can cook on aluminum foil like I did when my uncle stayed with us a couple of days, he was as bad as you, and I got enough glassware, pie plates, custard cups, you could eat from them and not have to go hungry, or go to the grocery and get something to eat from a paper bag like an animal.”

“Sure. I don’t mind if it’s not too much trouble for you, and if Dad doesn’t mind my eating separate food while he’s eating. You know how he is.”

“Yes, I know how he is.” She sat down across the table from him. “I know how he is, but do you know?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you know that your father is sixty-two years old already? And every day, winter and summer, in some of the worst storms, he goes to the store, he opens every day, and he works long hours. Even when it’s McLane’s day, your father opens and then instead of coming home as soon as McLane gets there, he’s apt to hang around all morning, then he goes at night to close. Ross McLane works a forty-hour week, but not your father, the other stores in the area close at eight or nine, but your father keeps open till ten every night, and you know why? Because he feels it’s his duty, his responsibility, the others close earlier and earlier because they’re afraid – so many holdups by these dope addicts –”

“Has Dad ever been held up?” he asked quickly.

“Once, but they caught them. Your father feels he’s safe because we’re on the Salem Road and lots of traffic, he never asks how I feel.”

“Well, gee. I don’t see what I can do.”

“You don’t see what you can do? Well, to start with you could go in and give your father a hand while you’re here, just so he can feel you’re still his son and a member of the family, then you could come and live here in Barnard’s Crossing, the same job you’re working at in a stranger’s store, you could do in our store, and then, in time, you could take over the store the way your father did from his father, that’s what you could do.”

“I’m not coming back to Barnard’s Crossing, that’s definite,” he said stubbornly. “I’ve made a life for myself in Philadelphia. My friends are all there.”

“But before that, your friends were all here. You were born here. You grew up here.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to die here.”

“Living in Barnard’s Crossing is like dying? It’s so bad here?”

“That’s not what I meant. Look, Ma, in Philly I got a job. I work forty hours a week, and the rest of the time is my own.”

“But you’re working for somebody else and just for wages.”

“So what? But when I’m through for the day, I’m free.”

“Listen, Arnold, a nurse takes care of children and a mother takes care of children. When she’s off duty, the nurse is free, but the mother is never free. So is it better to be a nurse or a mother? Here, you’d be working for –”

“Here. I’d be working for the store. When I was home. Dad cared a lot more about the store than he did about me,” he said bitterly.

She nodded. “It seems that way sometimes, that’s because a store, if you take care of it, it takes care of you. Your father lives from that store, and your grandfather before him. You remember him, your grandfather?”

“I was just a little kid when he died, but I remember him.”

“He was quite a man, your grandfather, he was a pharmacist in the old country, and when he came here, he was highly respected. Do you have any idea what it meant in those days to be a pharmacist, and even more, to have been one in the old country? All the other immigrants were tailors and cobblers and peddlers, ignorant men, most of them. But your grandfather had been to the gymnasium and to a technical college. Nowadays, to own a drugstore, maybe it isn’t so much. People think of it like any other business. How much does it take in? What’s the net profit? But in those days it was a profession like a doctor. You stayed open till midnight every night, not so you could make a few more sales, but because you had a responsibility to the community. Your father was brought up with that idea, the store isn’t just a store to him, that’s why he stays open later than any other drugstores in the area, and on Wednesday nights, when all the other stores close early on account the doctors take Wednesday afternoons off, he keeps open till his regular time.”

“Yeah, I know, sixty, seventy hours a week,” he said bitterly. “And he expected the same of me, and when I took time for a little fun, wham! he fell on me like a ton of brick.”

“You also took money from the cash register, Arnold,” she said sorrowfully. “That’s one thing a storekeeper can’t allow, not even from his own son. It’s like making a hole in the bottom of a boat.”

“I was going to put it back.”

“That kind of money you never put back. You lost it gambling and spending on your fancy girlfriends. Those were not nice people you were running around with over in Revere. It would only have got worse.”

“I never spent more than I could really afford, that IOU Kestler kept pressing me for, that had been hiked, all I owed was fifty dollars and they made it a hundred and fifty – ““You see the kind of people you were mixed up with?”

“All right, so what could I do? I was in a bind. Would you have felt better if I’d had both arms broken?”

“You should have told us. Your father would have taken care of it.”

“Oh sure!”

“Yes, sure, the day after you left, Kestler came in looking for you. Your father asked him what he wanted and he showed him the IOU. Your father paid him and then told him never to come into the store again.”

He crashed a fist down on the table and jumped up from his chair.” /paid him a week later, with my first pay check. I paid him off.”

“You paid him a hundred and fifty dollars?”

“I paid him fifty, that’s all I owed him. Oh, that bastard, I’ll kill him.”

“That’s nice language you use in front of your own mother. This is what your new religious friends teach you?”

“But Ma, he took the money from me after he’d already got paid off. I’m going to see him –”

“You’re here for a couple of days and you want to stir up trouble, then you’ll leave and –”

“But I can’t let him get away with it.”

“It seems to me you should be thinking of what you owe your father.”

“All right, I’ll send him a check as soon as I get back to Philly.”

“He doesn’t want your check.”

“So what does he want?”

“I told you what he wants, that’s too much? So the least you can do is while you’re here, go in the store and help out.”

“All right. I’ll go over right now.”

She considered. “No, better you should go tonight when Ross McLane will be there, too, the first day; it would be better if you were not alone, the two of you.”

“So I’ll go over right after the evening service.”

“And Arnold, don’t ask your father what to do. Go in like you owned the place. See what has to be done and start working.”

“Okay, okay.”

Morton Brooks, the principal of the religious school, knocked and, without waiting for an invitation, entered the rabbi’s study, he was forty and hence a year or two older than the rabbi. His long hair, artfully combed from the side across the top of his head, accentuated rather than concealed his baldness. For a short time during his youth he had had an office job with a Yiddish theater in New York which was always on the verge of bankruptcy and which occasionally called on him for walk-on parts to save the salary of an actor, as a result, he regarded himself as of the theater primarily, he had been teaching in Hebrew schools for the past fifteen years while awaiting a call from the producer.

“What’s the point of knocking if you don’t wait for me to say come in?” the rabbi asked peevishly.

“Oh, I knew you were alone.” said Brooks airily. “I listened at the door before I knocked.” He perched familiarly on the corner of the rabbi’s desk and lit a cigarette.

Inasmuch as they were of an age and Brooks was actually the elder, it was hard for the rabbi to put him in his place, especially when he was not sure what his place was, although it was generally understood that the rabbi had overall supervision of the education of the congregation in Judaism, the operation of the religious school was the responsibility of the principal, who answered not to the rabbi but to the school board, which was elected annually. Even in the matter of salary, the rabbi was not sure who was senior, since his own was voted openly by the temple’s board of directors while the principal’s and teachers’ salaries were negotiated confidentially by the school board.

Morton Brooks blew smoke toward the ceiling and said, “You haven’t forgotten about Sunday, have you, David?”

“What about Sunday?”

“It’s Parents Visiting Day.”

“Oh that? What about it?”

“Well, I wondered if we couldn’t make some changes in our procedure.”

“Like what?” the rabbi asked cautiously.

“Well, you remember when the school board set up Visiting Day a couple of years ago, the parent was supposed to discuss his kid with the teacher, then if he wasn’t satisfied, he could talk to one of us.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

Brooks’s voice took on a complaining tone. “Well, it didn’t work out that way, they’d see the teacher, then they’d see me and then they’d insist on talking to you, and sometimes you’d say things to them that didn’t exactly jibe with what I said.”

“I had no way of knowing what you’d told them.”

“Of course not. But the school board’s original idea was that we were to share the work. Instead, they go from me to you like going to a higher authority.”

“I can hardly refuse to talk to them,” the rabbi pointed out.

“Yeah, but suppose you weren’t available.” He leaned forward. “Now there’s a board of directors meeting at the same time and you normally attend. Suppose when they say they want to talk to you, I were to tell them that you had to attend the board meeting because it so happens that it’s a particularly important meeting.”

“Then all afternoon they’d be calling me at my house.” The rabbi shook his head. “Nothing doing. Besides, many of them would be wives of board members and they’d know that nothing much was going to happen at the meeting.”

“Don’t be so sure, David,” Brooks said loftily. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you’ll admit I know a lot more about what’s going on around here than you do.”

“Do you?”

“Of course I do. David. I see the kids every day and sometimes they talk about what they’ve heard at home, then a lot of them are delivered by their mothers or picked up by them, the mothers stand around in the corridor waiting for the classes to end, and plenty of times I hear them talking among themselves.”

“And what did you hear about Sunday’s meeting?” asked the rabbi with a smile.

Brooks temporized. “Nothing definite, you understand, but I got the idea that something is in the wind. I got the impression that some business is planned for this Sunday just because they know you’re not going to be there.”

“Any idea what?”

“Nothing definite. But if they are planning something, and I’m sure they are, this gives you a wonderful opportunity to turn the tables on them.” He got off the desk and circled to the visitor’s chair which he pulled forward so he could be closer to the rabbi. His voice became conspiratorial. “Right after the minyan Sunday, the board holds their meeting. Right? So instead of going to the boardroom, you say nonchalantlike, ‘Well, I guess I got to listen to parents’ complaints this morning,’ like it’s an awful chore, and you come right here to your study. Okay, so maybe a parent or two comes in to see you. Chances are they won’t, because usually they go to the classrooms to watch first. But you stay here regardless.

“In the meantime, down the hall the board has started their meeting and they’re listening to the secretary read the minutes and committee reports and maybe Old Business. I figure that will take until ten o’clock or so. You’d know that better than I do. I’m just guessing on the basis that the board meeting usually ends about the same time our classes do, at noon. So I figure the first hour must be mostly routine.”

“Go on.”

“Okay, then they get to New Business,” Brooks continued. “The way I figure it, there’ll be a group that is sold on the idea and they’re going to have to convince the rest. Now they’re afraid that if you were there, you’d throw a monkey wrench in the gears because it’s something you maybe wouldn’t approve of, or maybe you’d feel they ought to go slow on. Okay, so somebody gets up to make a motion.” He got up and raised his hand to suggest the person making the motion. “Somebody else seconds it.” He took a step to one side to indicate the seconder. “‘Discussion on the motion.’” He took a step back to represent the chairman. “So they discuss it for a while and maybe somebody calls for a vote.” Brooks went to the door of the study, opened and closed it with a bang, he posed in front of the door, his arms outstretched. “At that point you enter – Ta-ra!” He frowned and reconsidered. “No, better to play it in a low key.” He opened the door again and this time shut it quietly. “You kind of sidle in. Get it?” He looked at the rabbi eagerly.

The rabbi’s lips twitched. “Then what happens? Do I say anything?”

Morton Brooks frowned for a moment as he set the scene in his mind, then his face cleared. “Sure, that’s it. You’re playing it cool, so you say, ‘Would someone be kind enough to enlighten me as to the subject under discussion?’ Then you kind of look around and you notice a lot of red faces and maybe some that are too embarrassed to look you right in the eye. So you focus on one of them and he starts to squirm. You let him stew for a minute, and then you say, kind of sharplike, ‘Well, Mr. Meltzer?’” He looked expectantly at the rabbi who nodded and clapped his hands in applause.

“One of your best performances, Morton, then I suppose Meltzer breaks down and confesses that they were just going to vote to convert the temple into a roller-skating rink. No, Morton, nothing is going to happen at the meeting Sunday that doesn’t happen at any other meeting. If someone comes up with a new idea, they talk about it and then lay it on the table for the next meeting, and usually for the next and the next until they’ve talked it to death and finally put it to a vote, as for the parents. I’ll see them because their kids are important to them, and what’s more, because they’re important to me, a lot more than the board meeting.”