The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman And Matters Of Choice Part 147

The color of the air had seemed to me strangely tinged after Sarah died, as if everything had been washed in a very pale yellow. Part of me was functional. I telephoned the funeral director in Roslyn, Long Island, scheduled the funeral for the next day, directed my car to New York behind the hea.r.s.e, driving carefully. Carefully.

I stayed at a motel. In the morning, the service was simple. The rabbi at our former temple was new; he hadn't known Sarah, and I instructed him to make things very brief Employees of the funeral home served as pallbearers. The funeral director had placed a notice in the morning paper, but only a few people saw it in time to attend the funeral. At the Beth Moses Cemetery in West Babylon, two girls who had been Sarah's friends in grammar school held hands and wept, and five adults who had known our family when it had been young in Roslyn stood distressed as I sent away the grave diggers and filled in the hole myself, the stones in the first shovelfuls thumping onto the coffin, the rest just dirt on dirt until it was level with the rest of the ground and then mounded.

A heavy woman I hardly recognized, who had been Natalie's best friend in a slimmer, younger version, sobbed and clasped me to her, and her husband begged me to come home with them. I was scarcely aware of what I said to them.

I left at once, after the hea.r.s.e. I drove a mile or two and turned into the empty parking lot of a church, where I waited more than an hour. When I returned to the cemetery, the people who had attended the funeral were gone.

The two plots were close together. I sat between them, with one hand on the edge of Sarah's grave and one hand on Natalie's. No one bothered me.

I knew only my grief and an incredible aloneness. Late in the afternoon I got into my car and drove away.

I had no destination. It was as though the car were driving me, down Wellwood Avenue, over turnpikes, across bridges.

Into New Jersey.

In Newark I stopped at Old Glory, a workingman's bar just off the Jersey Pike. I had three quick drinks there but became aware of the staring, the silences. If I had on overalls or jeans, it wouldn't have mattered, but I wore a ruined and earth-stained single-breasted navy blue Hart Schaffner and Marx suit, and I was a ponytailed man, no longer young. So I paid and left the bar, walking to a package store and buying three fifths of Beefeaters that I took to the nearest motel.

I've heard hundreds of drunks talk about the taste of liquor. Some describe it as "liquid stars," "sipping nectar," "stuff of the G.o.ds." I've always hated the taste of grain alcohols and stick to vodka or gin. In the motel room I sought oblivion, drinking until I fell asleep. Whenever I awoke, I would lie there puzzled for a few moments, fumbling with my mind, and then terrible pain, calamitous memory would flood in, and I would drink again.

It was an old, familiar pattern, which I had perfected long ago, drinking in locked rooms where I was safe. The three bottles kept me drunk for four days. I was wretchedly ill for a day and a night, and then I had the blandest breakfast I could find and checked out of the motel and let the car take me somewhere.

It was a routine I had lived before, familiar and easily readapted. I never drove when drunk, understanding that I was kept from disaster only by my car, my wallet with its plastic cards, and my checkbook.

I drove slowly and automatically, my mind numb, trying to leave reality behind. But there always came a moment, sooner or later, when reality entered the car and rode with me, and whenever the pain grew beyond bearing I stopped, bought a couple of bottles, and checked into a room.

I got drunk in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I got drunk outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, and in places I never identified. I was drunk on and off through the change of seasons.

One warm, early-autumn morning-very early morning-badly hung over, I found myself driving down a country road. It was a nice rolling landscape, although the hills were lower than in Woodfield, and there were more worked fields than forest. I pulled the car around a horse-drawn black buggy driven by a bearded man wearing a straw hat, white s.h.i.+rt, and black pants with suspenders.

Amish.

I pa.s.sed a farmhouse and saw a woman in a long dress and a little prayer cap helping two boys unload winter squash from the back of a flat wagon. Across a cornfield, another man drove a five-horse rig, harvesting oats.

I was nauseated and my head hurt.

I drove slowly through the farm country, houses all white or unpainted, wonderful barns, water towers with windmills, well-tended fields. I thought perhaps I was back in Pennsylvania, maybe near Lancaster, but pretty soon I came to the town line and learned I was driving out of Apple Creek, Ohio, and into the towns.h.i.+p of Kidron. I had a powerful thirst. Had I known it, I was less than a mile and a half from stores, a motel, cold Coca-Cola, food. But I didn't know it.

I could easily have driven by the house, but I came upon an empty buggy with the shafts resting on the macadam of the road, the broken leather traces telling a mute story of how the horse got away.

I pa.s.sed a man running after a mare that seemed to know what she was doing, keeping just ahead.

Without a second thought, when I drove past the horse, I turned my car to block the road, then I got out and stood in front of the car and waved my arms at the approaching animal. There was a fence on one side of the road and high corn on the other; when the mare slowed I went forward, talking soothingly, and grabbed the bridle.

The man came puffing up, glowering. "Danke. Sehr Danke. You know how to handle these creatures, yes?"

"We used to own a horse."

The man's face started to swim, and I leaned back against the car.

"You are krank? Help you need?"

"No, I'm fine. Just fine." The dizziness was pa.s.sing. What I needed was to get out of the sun's bright hammer. I had Tylenol in the car. "Perhaps you know where I can get some water."

The man nodded and pointed at the nearby house. "Those people, they will give you water. Knock on their door."

The farmhouse was surrounded by cornfield but it wasn't owned by Amish-I could see into the backyard, where a number of automobiles were parked. I had already knocked on the door when I noted the small sign: YEs.h.i.+VA YISROEL. "The Study House of Israel." Through the open windows came chanted Hebrew, unmistakably from one of the psalms, Bayt Yisroel barachu et-Adonai, bayt Aharon barachu et-Adonai. "O house of Israel, bless the Lord, O house of Aaron, bless the Lord."

The door was opened by a bearded man who looked Amish down to the dark trousers and the white s.h.i.+rt, but there was a skullcap on his head, his left s.h.i.+rtsleeve was rolled up, and phylacteries were wound about his forehead and his arm. Beyond him, men were seated at a table.

He peered at me. "Come in, come in. Bist ah Yid?"

"Yes."

"We've been waiting for you," he said in Yiddish.

There were no introductions. Introductions came later. "You're the tenth man," a graybeard offered. I understood that I made the minyan, enabling them to stop chanting the psalms and begin morning prayers. A couple of the men smiled, another grouchily muttered that Gottenyu, it was about time. Inwardly, I groaned. Under the best of circ.u.mstances I wouldn't wish to be captive to an Orthodox service.

Yet under these circ.u.mstances, what could I do? There were water and gla.s.ses on the table, and first they let me drink. Somebody handed me phylacteries.

"No, thank you."

"What? Don't be a nahr, you must put on the tefillin, they don't bite," the man growled.

It had been too many years, they had to help me wrap the thin leather strap down my forearm, correctly across my palm, around the middle finger. And fix the box containing the Scripture between my eyes. In the meantime two other men came in and put on tefillin and said the brocha, but n.o.body hurried me. I learned later they were accustomed to irreligious Jews stumbling in on them; it was a mitzvah, it counted as a blessing to be able to give instruction. When the prayers started I found my neglected Hebrew rusty but very serviceable; at the seminary, in ancient days, I had been praised for my beautiful Hebrew. Near the end of the service three of the men stood for Kaddish, the prayers for the recently dead, and I stood with them.

After we prayed, we breakfasted on oranges, hard-boiled eggs, kichlach, and strong tea. I was wondering how to escape when they cleared the table of breakfast things and brought out oversized Hebrew books, the pages yellowed and tattered, the corners of the leather covers bent and worn.

In a moment they were studying as they sat on their unmatched kitchen chairs, but not just studying-contradicting, arguing, listening with the keenness of full attention. The topic was the extent to which humankind is composed of yetzer hatov, good inclinations, as opposed to yetzer harah, inclinations toward doing evil. I was amazed at the infrequency with which they consulted the texts before them; they plucked from their memories entire pa.s.sages of the oral law redacted by Rabbi Judah eighteen hundred years ago. Their minds sped through both the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, easily and with style, like kids doing tricks on rollerblades. They engaged in pilpulistic debate over points in The Guide to the Perplexed, the Zohar, a dozen commentaries. I realized I was witnessing daily scholars.h.i.+p as it had been practiced for almost six thousand years and in many places, in the great Talmudic academy of Nahardea, in the beth midresh of Ras.h.i.+, in the study of Maimonides, in the yes.h.i.+vas of eastern Europe.

The discussion sometimes was waged in quicksilver bursts of Yiddish, Hebrew, Aramaic, colloquial English. Much of it I couldn't understand, but often it slowed as they considered a citation. My head still pounded, but I was fascinated by what I was able to comprehend.

I could identify the head man, an elderly Jew with a full white beard and mane, a fat little belly under his prayer shawl, stains on his tie, round steel spectacles magnifying intense, agate-blue eyes. The Rebbe sat and answered the questions that were put to him from time to time.

Somehow, the morning sped. I felt that I was a captive in a dream. When they broke for lunch at midday, the scholars went to get their brown-bag lunches, and I shook myself out of my reverie and prepared to leave, but the Rebbe beckoned.

"You will come with me, please. We will eat something."

I followed him out of the study hall, through two small cla.s.srooms with rows of worn desks and children's Hebrew homework pinned to the walls next to the blackboards, and up a flight of stairs.

It was a small, neat apartment. The painted floors shone, there were lace doilies on the parlor furniture. Everything was in its place; clearly, it wasn't the home of small children.

"Here I live with my wife Dvora. She is at her job in the next town, women's klayder she sells. I am Rabbi Moscowitz."

"David Markus."

We shook hands.

The saleswoman had left tuna salad and vegetables in the fridge, and the Rebbe deftly plucked slices of challah from the freezer section and popped them into the toaster.

"Nu," he said when he had blessed the food and we were eating. "So what do you do? Salesman?"

I hesitated. To say I sold real estate would provoke awkward curiosity about what might be up for sale locally. "I'm a writer."

"Truly? About what do you write?"

It was what happened when one wove a tangled web, I lectured myself. "Agriculture."

"There's lots of farming here," the Rebbe said, and I nodded.

We ate in companionable silence. When we were through, I helped clear the table.

"Do you like apples?"

"Yes."

The Rebbe took some early McIntoshes from the refrigerator. "Do you have a room to stay tonight?"

"Not yet."

"So be by us, we rent our extra room, it isn't dear. And in the morning you will help make the minyan. Why not?"

The apple I bit into was tart and crisp. On the wall I saw a picture calendar from a manufacturer of matzos, showing the Wailing Wall. I was very tired of being in my car, and when I had used the bathroom, it had been spotless. Why not, indeed? I thought dizzily.

Rabbi Moscowitz got up several times during the night to go to the bathroom, shuffling on bunioned feet in carpet slippers; I figured he had an enlarged prostate.

Dvora, the Rebbe's wife, was a small, gray woman with a pink face and lively eyes. She reminded me of a kindly squirrel, and each morning she sang Yiddish love songs and lullabies in a sweet, quavering voice as she prepared breakfast.

I didn't unpack my clothing into the bureau drawers but lived out of my suitcase, aware I would be leaving soon. Every morning I made my own bed and put my things away. Dvora Moscowitz told me everybody should have such a boarder.

On Friday for dinner there was the same fare my mother had served me when I was a boy: gefilte fish, chicken soup with mandlen, roast chicken with potato kugel, fruit compote, and tea. Friday afternoon, Dvora made a cholent for the following day, when it was for bidden to cook. She placed potatoes, onions, garlic, white pearl barley and navy beans into an earthenware pot and covered them with water. She added salt, pepper, and paprika, and set it to boiling. A couple of hours before the onset of the Sabbath, she added a large flanken and placed the pot into the oven, where it baked in low heat all through the Shabbos, until the following evening.

There was a wonderful baked crust over everything when the cholent pot was opened, and the rich blend of aromas made me swallow.

Rabbi Moscowitz took a bottle of Seagram's Seven Crown whiskey from a cupboard and filled two shot gla.s.ses.

"Not for me."

The Rebbe spread his hands. "No shnappsel?"

I knew if I took the drink the bottle of vodka would come out of my car, and this house wasn't the place to get sodden drunk.

"I'm an alcoholic."

"Ah. So ..." The Rebbe nodded and pursed his lips.

It was as if I had been able to step into a story I had heard my parents relating about the Orthodox Jewish world into which they had been born. But sometimes at night I awoke and recent memory flooded in, bringing pain that made me want to reach for the bottle. Once I left my bed and walked downstairs and out into the dew-wet yard in my bare feet. I opened the trunk of the car and found the vodka and drank two great life-saving swallows, but I didn't bring the bottle back in with me when I reentered the house. If either the Rebbe or Dvora had heard me, neither of them said anything to me in the morning.

Every day I sat with the scholars, feeling like one of the cheder children who came to the cla.s.srooms in the afternoons. These men had sharpened their intellects throughout their lifetimes, so that the least of them was light-years beyond my own feeble scholars.h.i.+p of the Bible and halacha, Jewish law. I made no mention to them that I had been graduated from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and ordained as a rabbi. I knew that to them a Conservative or Reform rabbi wasn't a rabbi. And certainly not a rebbe.

So I listened in silence as they debated about human beings and their capacity for good and evil, about marriage and divorce, about treyf and kashruth, about crime and punishment, about birth and death.

I found myself especially interested in one exchange. Reb Levi Dressner, a trembling old man with a husky voice, pointed out three different sages who said a good old age could be a reward for righteousness, but even the righteous could meet death early in life, a great misfortune.

Reb Reuven Mendel, stout and fortyish, with a red face, cited work after work that allowed those who survived to be comforted with the thought that in death young people often were reunited with a mother or a father.

Reb Yehuda Nahman, a pale boy with sleepy eyes and a silky brown beard, cited several authorities who were certain the dead carried on a connection with the living and had an interest in the affairs of their lives.

46.

KIDRON.

"So, did you spend the entire year with the Orthodox Jews?" R.J. asked.

"No, I ran away from them, too."

"What happened?" R.J. said. She picked up a triangle of cold toast and took a bite.

Dvora Moscowitz was quiet and respectful in the presence of her husband and the other scholars, but as if aware that I was different, when she was alone with me, she became chatty.

She was working hard to make the apartment and the study house spotless in time for the High Holidays, and in between was.h.i.+ngs and polis.h.i.+ngs and scrubbings she filled me in on the history and legends of the family Moscowitz.

"Twenty-seven years I have been selling dresses at the Bon Ton Shop. I am really looking forward to next July."

"And what will happen then?"

"I'll be sixty-two years old, and I'll retire on Social Security." She relished weekends because she didn't work Fridays and Sat.u.r.days, her Shabbos, and the shop was closed on Sundays, the owner's sabbath. She had given the Rebbe four children before she was unable to bear more, G.o.d's will. They had three sons, two of them in Israel. Label ben Shlomo was a scholar in a study house in Mea Shearim, Pincus ben Shlomo was rabbi of a congregation in Petah Tikva. Her youngest, Irving Moscowitz, sold life insurance in Bloomington, Indiana. "My black sheep."

"And your fourth child?"

"She was a daughter, Leah, died when she was two years old. Diphtheria." There was a silence. "And you? You have children?"

I found myself telling her, not only forced to face it, to think about it, but to put it into words.

"So. It's a daughter you're saying Kaddish for." She took my hand. Our eyes became moist, I was desperate to escape. Presently she made tea and plied me with mandel bread and carrot candy.

In the morning I got up very early, while they still slept. I made my bed, left money and a brief note of thanks, and stole away with my suitcase to the car while darkness still hid the stubbled fields.

I stayed drunk throughout the Days of Awe-in a flophouse in the town of Windham, in a rickety tourist cabin in Revenna. In Cuyahoga Falls, the manager of the motel let himself into my locked room after I had been drinking for three days and told me to leave. I sobered sufficiently to drive that night to Akron, where I found the shabby old Majestic Hotel, a victim of the motel age. The corner room on the third floor needed paint and was full of dust. Through one window I saw smoke from a rubber factory and through another glimpsed the brown flowing of the Muskingum River. I stayed holed up there for eight days. A bellman named Roman brought liquor whenever I ran dry. The hotel had no room service. Roman went someplace-it must have been a distance because it always took him so long-to fetch bad coffee and greasy hamburgers. I tipped generously so Roman wouldn't roll me while I was drunk.

I never learned whether that was the bellman's first or last name.