“Nu, by coming for a seder, they make all the hard part okay, the hard part of a year, the hard part of a whole life,” the rabbi said. “We are all together, means we survive again another year.”
But nobody was coming this year, and Michael could feel the loneliness seeping through the room like a fog.
“Maybe you could come to our house, Rabbi,” he said. “Have a seder with us.”
“No,” Rabbi Hirsch said firmly, and then sighed and grew lighter. “Next year, here we have seder. And we send to Jackie Robinson a note too.”
They talked a while longer, the rabbi scrubbing and dusting while Michael, for the first time, prepared tea.
“How come Passover and Easter come around the same time?” the boy asked. “You know, just before Opening Day?”
The rabbi smiled.
“Opening Day, I don’t know about,” he said. “But the other is simple. The Last Supper? You know, the famous painting? The supper that it happened just before Easter?”
“Sure.”
“Well, the Last Supper, it was a seder,” the rabbi said. “Jesus and his friends were together to give thanks for the freeing from Egypt.”
“You’re kidding!”
“No. So you better take this hametz home. The cleaning I got to finish.”
Michael lifted the grocery bag and went to the door. He paused with his hand on the doorknob and turned to the rabbi, who was opening a box of steel wool.
“Rabbi?”
“Yes.”
“I have a question.”
“Yes?”
Two questions. Not one. Two. Ask. No, don’t ask. Yes, go ahead. Ask. Ask.
Michael took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and asked his first question.
“If God sent a plague against the Pharaoh to save the Jews,” the boy said, “why didn’t he send a plague against the Nazis?”
The rabbi was very still. His hands were limp against his sides.
“I don’t know,” he whispered in a voice powdery with despair. “I don’t know.”
He sounded like a rabbi who didn’t like God very much, and certainly didn’t love Him. And maybe didn’t believe in Him at all anymore. Michael did not ask his second question. He did not ask what had happened to the rabbi’s wife.
21
On Easter Sunday morning, Michael kept looking at his reflection in the store windows as he walked along Ellison Avenue. The priests told them at church that Easter was about Jesus rising from the dead, proving His immortality; everybody in the parish knew better. It was about new clothes. And in his new blue suit, white shirt, striped tie, and polished black shoes, Michael thought he looked older, more mature, whatever that vague word meant. Not yet a man, but no longer a boy.
He saw a girl named Mary Cunningham coming out of her building across from the factory. She was thin, with long brown hair, and was dressed in a light blue coat and a straw hat with plastic flowers around the crown. She smiled at him in what he felt was a new way. She was in his grade at Sacred Heart, but since the boys were separated from the girls at school, they only saw each other in the schoolyard or on the street.
“Happy Easter, Michael,” she said, smiling. Unlike some of the other girls in his grade, she didn’t wear braces. Her teeth were as hard and white as Lana Turner’s.
“Yeah, same to you,” he said.
“That’s a great suit,” she said.
“I like that hat too,” Michael said. “You going to mass?”
“Of course,” she said. “We have to go, right? But I gotta wait for my father and mother.”
His own mother had gone to the eight o’clock mass, which was all right with Michael. He didn’t want her walking him to mass as if he were a first grader.
“See you there,” Michael said to Mary Cunningham, and moved along more lightly in the bright spring morning. Suddenly Mrs. Griffin was calling to him from across the street. She was dressed in a tan coat and high heels and laughing hysterically.
“Michael, Michael, hey, Michael Devlin,” she shouted, looking both ways for traffic, then scurrying across to him. “You heard the news?”
“What news?” She was more excited than she had been when the war ended.
“Your mother didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“My horse came in!” she said. “What’d I tell you? You gotta have faith! And it was all because of you, Michael. You told me your dreams, right? And we figured out some of them. But I couldn’t figure out that damned bowler hat. I thought about it for days and nights. Then yesterday I’m looking at the charts in the Daily News, I see there’s a horse running in the third at Belmont, and get this: his name is Bowler Hat! I say to myself, I say, God used Michael to give me a winner! I knew it in my bones. I knew it in my heart! God says to Himself, That Mrs. Griffin, she needs a few bucks, she needs a gas stove, she needs some nylons. So He sends a dream through you to me. I run across the street, and I put five bucks on Bowler Hat with the bookie, and son of a gun if it don’t come in by a lengt’ and a half and pays twenty-two to one. I’m rich, Michael!”
She hugged him and put a bill in the palm of his hand.
“Keep the faith, Michael,” she said, “and keep on dreaming, kid.”
She pirouetted away and Michael opened his hand. A five-dollar bill. From a nightmare! He’d never had a five-dollar bill of his own before, and his head filled with objects as he hurried on to mass: flowers for his mother, a box of chocolates for her, comic books, maybe a hardcover book. Or he could give the whole five bucks to his mother to help save for a phonograph. Or maybe he could have a date with Mary Cunningham. Take her for a soda. Or to the Grandview when his mother wasn’t working. He’d never gone out with a girl, but he knew about dates from the movies and Archie comics and Harold Teen in the Daily News. And Sonny talked about the things you did with girls. In the balcony. In the park.
He turned into Kelly Street, skipping along, thinking about girls and the things Sonny told him about them and the mysteries of their bodies. He wondered too what Mary Cunningham thought when she saw him in his new blue suit and what she would think if he talked to her in Yiddish or quoted Latin from the mass. Would she think he was weird? Or would she think he was the smartest guy she’d ever met? He wondered too what it would be like to touch her skin or play with her hair, and then wondered if such thoughts were sins.
And then stopped near the synagogue as he heard a low, angry, keening sound. A sound of deep, hopeless pain.
He followed the sound to the corner, and there was Rabbi Hirsch, his face the color of ashes, anger and grief clenching his jaws. He had a coarse towel in his hands and was violently scrubbing the walls of the front of the synagogue. Someone had painted about a dozen red swastikas on the dirty white bricks. The words JEW GO were daubed on the sealed front door. Even the sight of Michael did not ease his pained fury.
“How could they do this?” the rabbi shouted bitterly. “Who could do this?”
Michael put his arm around the rabbi’s waist, trying to comfort him, but the rabbi pulled away from the boy, seething with anger, and grabbed the picket fence for support. Michael backed away, feeling wounded and stupid, but also fearful that the wet paint would end up on his new suit. The rabbi reached for a mop and stabbed at the swastikas, smearing the fresh red paint.
“Wait here,” Michael said. “Don’t go away.”