Now I recalled how interested I’d been, and the moment when the sun came up and he couldn’t finish his story because we had to take off.
We were back in Fairbanks, parked in front of the hotel where he was staying. I had to drop off my rental car at the airport before my flight, I told him.
“Well,” he said, “it was good seeing you.”
“Next time,” I said carefully, “on a better occasion.”
“Yeah,” he said, and put his hand out to open the door. For the first time I noticed the mourner’s band on the right sleeve of his coat.
“Listen,” I said, and touched him on the shoulder, “I’m sorry about Phil. I can’t tell you.”
“Thanks,” he said. “But you know something?”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” he said, sloughing off my condolence, “we like drifted apart.”
Then he opened the door and got out. I started to turn the key in the ignition, but the man with the flowers in his beard was rapping on the window for my attention. I leaned across to roll the window down on his side and he pushed his big head into the car.
Up close, straight on, the beard seemed lopsided, lifeless. I caught the pinched, stale scent of mold. “Ain’t no murracles,” old Posypuss said, “I dud wished dey would was, but dey ain’t.”
As Petch had predicted, McBride let me play out my contract. As a matter of fact, he wouldn’t let me resign and made me play it out. I guess he thought I was pretty well seasoned by the time of those Rosh Hashanah services and didn’t figure even Alyeska could afford another greenhorn rabbi until the fiscal year ran out on the one they already had.
He never mentioned the Torahs. McBride, like the Eskimos, was a gentleman too.
Which isn’t to say I could ever stop thinking of Flowerface out there in the dark. Out on that iceberg, in that proper, heroic blackness he rubbed against like braille, yogi-ing his bloodstream and rearranging his metabolics and contemplating not the ways of God or even Man, but figuring red tape, the long odds of Corporate Life, how the Feds would probably require affirmative action, Prots and Mackerel — snappers and even Jews demanding rabbis, Torahs, the works, and what all this could mean to him at Alaskan prices, till he saw what it felt like to move at a glacier’s pace, a few fast feet a day with the wind in his face.
six
WHERE,” I asked, “could we go?”
“Shh,” Shelley said afterward as we lay in each other’s arms in the dark. “Shh.”
“You told Connie we’d leave Lud. And do what? Where? How?”
“Shh. Shah. Ay le lu lu.”
“Where, Shelley? What would I do?”
“Later-le.”
“Later-le’s too late. Right-e-le now.”
“Leave-e-le now?”
“Talk-e-le now, ask-e-le questions afterward.”
Because it’s one thing to calm your kid down with easy promises, but I’m not talking about eat your greens, sweetheart, we’ll go get 31 flavors. Connie’s no fool. She had real problems, even — I say it — legitimate gripes. Not all that death prattle, of course, ghosts in the drinking water, phantoms in her pants. Not even my failure with God in the Stanley Bloom affair, nothing metaphysical. She had flawed birthrights, I think. A misser-out on the gemütlich circumstance, the curled and comfy lap-robe life. I don’t know, maybe it would have been better for her if she’d had an aversion to the four food groups, better if we could have done business, traded and bribed her, appetite for appetite, taken her to the mall more, kept her up past her bedtime, made nests for her in the back of the car and driven her home in the dark. Maybe we should have turned the radio low and shifted from texture to texture for her on the highways, playing the percussives and hypnotics of different road surfaces like some long, cozy organ, the dash’s soft glow and the averted headlamps of oncoming cars like light skimming along the walls and ceilings of dark bedrooms. But still her stinted birthright. She was an only child. She had no grandparents, no cousins, no uncles, no aunts. Was this mild orphan of relation. (“I’m the last of your line,” she told us once. “When I marry there’ll be no more Goldkorns,” she’d said, and burst into tears. “Please don’t cry,” Shelley said, “I’m the same as you are.” “Me too,” I said, “the fall of the House of Usherkorn.”) But another thing altogether to offer to change their life.
Which is what I’d been trying to impress upon Shelley.
“What?” I asked. “Where?”
“Anywhere,” she said drowsily.
“Anywhere. Shell?”
“Mnn?”
“What?”
“Anything-e-ling-e-ding-e-ling-e,” she murmured and then, I swear it, actually yawned in that pidgin Yiddish or whatever the hell else it was she thought she was speaking.
“Shelley, wake up, we’ve got to talk.” I shook my wife.
“What,” she said, “what is it?”
“A couple of days ago you told Connie we’d leave Lud and she believed you. Jesus, Shell, I believed you. All right, the kid hasn’t made a fuss, she hasn’t even brought it up again, but I see her watching me. Yesterday I told her I hadn’t had time to type up my resume yet but that I was working on it. Working on it. It would take me ten minutes! Two minutes to write and eight to find the envelope to stick it in, address, and drink the glass of water to get rid of the bad taste in my mouth from sealing it and licking the stamp. Only I’ll tell you, Shelley,” I said, “I’m fresh the hell out of ideas.”
“Poor Jerry.”
“Shelley, you don’t know.”
“Poor Jerry. So much on his head.”
“I mean really,” I said, “what experience have I had?”
“Thinking about Talmud all day. Talmud Talmud Talmud.”
“A man my age. It’s worse than being fired. Really,” I said, “it is. It really is.”
“Tch tch. Should I say something to Connie? I’ll say something to Connie. You want me to say something?”
“No,” I said, “the kid’s got real problems. You think I’d go along with any of this if I didn’t believe she had real problems?”
“She said ‘goddamn.’ She said ‘asshole’ to her papa.”
“They lay you off, at least they offer to retrain you. They teach you computer programming, give you a hundred dollars and a new suit.”
“Everything’s going to be fine. You worry too much.”
“Talmud Talmud Talmud.”
“I know,” Shelley said.
“So here’s what I’ve come up with.”
“What’s that?”
“We emigrate to Israel. They’d have to take us in. It’s the Law of the Return.”
“Emigrate? To Israel?”
“Sure,” I said. “It won’t be so bad. They set us up in a suitable kibbutz.”
“We emigrate to Israel?”
“I thought you’d be pleased. You’d be an Israel-e-li.”
“But Jerry,” she said, “all we have to do is move to Fairlawn.”
“What?”
“Or Ridgewood.”
“What?”
“Or any of dozens of towns. We’ve got all northern Jersey to choose from.”
“Jesus,” I said, “northern Jersey!”
“Sure,” Shelley said, “I asked one of the girls in The Chaverot to be on the lookout, to tell me if she heard of a place. Elaine Iglauer?”
“Elaine Iglauer. The one who moves. Yes?”
“You should have heard the leads she came up with just off the top of her head.”
“Sure,” I said, “she knows her stuff.”
“She really does.”
“You’re telling me,” I said. “Seven houses in six different towns.”
“Oh, you’re behind. They’ve just closed on their eighth.”