The Day the Rabbi Resigned (5 page)

Cyrus himself opened the door to him and then called out, “Aggie, Peg, company.” The two women came down from the upper floor together. Cyrus's sister Agnes looked to be just a few years younger than her brother. But it was on Margaret that his attention was focused. He decided that his original surmise had been correct: she was plain. Her hair was thin and straight, and she had an overbite which in combination with a long, thin nose gave her a sad look. But her skin was white and clear and free of blemish. She reminded him of Sister Bertha, his sixth-grade teacher, whom he used to dream of.

“Have you had lunch?” asked Agnes anxiously, and appeared relieved when he assured her that he had. He'd had a sandwich and a cup of coffee at the railroad station while waiting for his train.

“Well, that's fine,” said Cyrus, rubbing his hands. “Now, I said I'd show you the town, but I'm going to be tied up for a while. If you don't mind waiting …”

“Oh, sure,” said Joyce.

“Or tell you what. Peg could take you around. That be all right? Do you mind, Peg?”

“Oh sure. I'll just get my scarf. I won't be a minute.”

It was a warm April day, and they rode in her roadster with the top down. Behind the wheel, with her head raised against the breeze coming over the windshield, he thought she looked quite attractive. She drove out to the lighthouse and they got out and stared down at the harbor with its hundreds of small sailboats. Then they got back in the car, and she offered commentary as they drove along. “That's the Carlson Yacht Club. They don't have Catholics or Jews.” A little farther on, “That's the North Shore Yacht Club. They have Catholics, but no Jews. And just beyond, that brown house, is the Barnard's Crossing Club. They allow anyone to join.” She showed him the Catholic church and told him that the pastor, Father Joseph Tierney, was an old curmudgeon and that his curate was Father Bill. She thought perhaps Father Joseph didn't care too much for his curate. “We make a point of going to Father Joseph's Mass because my aunt and uncle think Father Bill is too modern.”

They drove down to the center of town and parked once again, so they could walk along the narrow streets where many of the houses had little mounted tablets giving their date of construction and who had built them originally. Most of these houses had been built in the eighteenth century, but some as early as the seventeenth.

“None of the houses are particularly attractive,” she pointed out, “but the net effect is quaint. Which is why the town has begun to attract a lot of artists. Uncle Cyrus doesn't approve of them and won't rent to them. But he'll sell them. He says if they've got enough money to buy a house, they're probably pretty stable, but if they only want to rent, you can't trust them not to have wild parties and do damage.”

As it began to grow dark, he suggested dropping in at one of the numerous cafés for coffee, but she explained, “We have supper promptly at seven. Mrs. Marston—she's the cook and the housekeeper—kind of expects us to eat then. She's apt to get annoyed if we're late.”

“What does she do? Break dishes?”

“No, but she somehow manages to show it.”

“Well, how about a movie afterward?”

“I'd like that,” she said. “There's a good movie at the Criterion. I've wanted to see it, but neither Uncle Cyrus nor Aunt Agnes cared to go, and I don't like to go alone.”

Supper was served by Mrs. Marston in the large paneled dining room. Conversation was concentrated on their afternoon excursion. “Did you see …” “Did you show him …” “Why didn't you take him to …” And he was called upon to give his impressions, of course approving of what he had seen.

When they finished the meal, Margaret announced, “Victor is taking me to the Criterion.”

“I hear it's a good picture,” said Agnes.

“Don't bring her home too late,” said Cyrus with a twinkle, from which Victor deduced that he expected them to go someplace afterward rather than come home immediately after the movie was over. Then he added, “We go to the early Mass, you know.”

The movie ended shortly after ten, and this time they did go to a café. He could have had a cocktail, and he wanted one, but he forebore because he thought it might be politic not to, and ordered beer instead. They sat and talked about themselves mostly. She told him about her school, about the teachers she had liked and those whom she did not care for.

“Your uncle said you had thought of entering a convent,” he said at one point.

“Yes, I thought I had a vocation, but my uncle felt that perhaps it was just that I had been in contact with the Sisters all my life, and it was that rather than a real call. He wanted me to experience the secular world a bit before making up my mind. He's been so kind to me, I thought the least I could do to reciprocate was to do what he wanted me to do.”

“And has your experience of the world changed your mind?”

“I haven't experienced very much of it, so I can't tell.”

They got home just before midnight.

After church they spent the morning watching the various political programs on TV and reading the Sunday papers, and dinner was served after the last news program was completed. It was a lavish meal with Cornish game hen as the main course, and Victor enjoyed it, but he was also beginning to get fidgety. If he could have gone off for a walk, or if Cyrus had taken him into his study for a talk, the situation would have been tolerable. But he sensed that Sunday was the day they were supposed to be together, and that to split up in any way at all would be taken in bad part. He wondered how long he was expected to stay, and whether he might not plead the necessity of having to prepare his lectures for the next day as an excuse for leaving early. Fortunately, Cyrus was called to the telephone, and when he hung up, he said, “I've got to run up to Revere. I can take you to the Swampscott station, where you can make the three o'clock into Boston.”

“Oh swell, I'll get my things.”

When he dropped him off at the train station, Cyrus said, “I hope you had a nice time.”

“I had a wonderful time, Mr. Merton. You were all so kind.”

“How about next week? Agnes asked me to ask you, and I know Peg would like to see you again.”

“I'd certainly like that.”

“Look, I have an idea. I'm coming in to Boston Friday. Why don't you plan on coming out Friday instead of Saturday. Bring your things to school, and I can pick you up after your last class and we could drive out to Barnard's Crossing together.”

“Well—I had sort of a date to go to a driving range and hit a couple of buckets of balls. It's the only exercise I get.” He had actually planned to see Marcia Skinner if she was free.

“Golf? You play golf? Then bring your clubs with you Friday. There's a golf course in Breverton, the next town north of Barnard's Crossing. Maybe half an hour's drive. Bring your clubs and Peg can drive you out there Saturday morning, and she can walk around with you. And you can have lunch at the club afterward. They have an excellent dining room.”

In the half-hour ride from Swampscott to Boston's North Station, Victor Joyce thought about the weekend he had just spent. He felt certain that the reason for the invitation was not so that Cyrus Merton could judge his candidacy for tenure, but as a possible husband for his niece. Pretending some business so that she could substitute for him in showing him the town was pretty obviously an attempt to throw them together. He suspected that if he had not invited her to go to a movie, Cyrus or Agnes would have suggested it. Maybe all that questioning about what they had seen and what they had missed in the tour of the town was intended to justify a suggestion that they make another survey of the area. And the invitation for the following week, that clinched it, didn't it?

Well, why not? He was thirty-two and she was, what? Nineteen? Twenty? It was time he got married. True, she was not what he had pictured as the kind of girl he would marry. He had rather thought in terms of someone beautiful and voluptuous. And she was certainly not that. On the other hand, they had made it plain that since she was their only relative, she would eventually inherit what they had indicated was a very considerable estate. That was in the future, to be sure, but on the immediate question of tenure, surely there could be no doubt.

In some departments the tenured members voted on who was to be granted tenure and thereby included in their number. In other departments, and the English Department was one, the chairman of the department decided. He would then notify the dean, who would pass on the recommendation to the Committee on Faculty of the Board of Trustees, whose chairman, Cyrus Merton, would notify the president, who made the final decision. Well, if he were an in-law of Merton's would Arthur Sugrue, chairman of the English Department, dare to nominate someone else? With all that Merton had to say about salaries, allocation of funds, even courses of study and subjects to be taught?

But the girl was plain. On the other hand, she exuded a kind of virginal purity that was—his mind fished for a word—challenging, even exciting, sexually exciting. The train pulled into the station. He made his way to the subway station to go home. He fished in his pocket for change for the turnstile, and found Marcia Skinner's card. He considered for a moment, and then went to one of the public pay stations.

When she answered, he said, “Marcia? Are you free? I'd like to finish the weekend.”

“Oh, it's you. Where are you? You want to come over, is that it?”

“Yeah. I could be there in half an hour.”

“All right.”

When she opened the door for him, she was wearing a long silk dressing gown. She glanced at the bag he was carrying. “You plan on moving in?” she asked.

“Just for the night,” he said, and took her in his arms. His hands stroked her back as he held her close to him. Then he reached for the zipper tab at the back of her gown. “And I thought we'd make it an early night,” he said as he pulled it down.

7

Tuesday, the rabbi made his usual trip to the Salem Hospital. He stopped at the front desk to get a list of the Jewish patients, and then repaired immediately to Morris Fisher's room, so that if he were absent again, he could see the others and then double back to Fisher.

Fisher was a man of seventy, short and fat, with a bald head surrounded by a fringe of grizzled white hair. He had suffered a small stroke from which he had largely recovered, but was being kept at the hospital for further observation. When the rabbi came to see him, he was out of bed, sitting in the one chair in the room, in his pajamas and bathrobe. For a few days his left side had been partially paralyzed, but he had now recovered motion and feeling in both his leg and his arm, and all that remained was a slight twisting of the left side of his mouth, which gave him a sardonic look.

When the rabbi entered, Fisher greeted him with, “Hello, Rabbi, I bet you don't recognize me.”

Since he was one of those who rarely appeared in the temple except on the High Holy Days, the rabbi might very well have failed to recognize him, but obviously that was not what was intended by the remark. The implication was, rather, that his physical appearance had changed so radically by reason of his illness that intimates would fail to know him.

But the rabbi rejected the gambit and asked innocently, “Lost a little weight, have you?”

“That, too,” Fisher conceded. “I've been here a week now. You can lose a lot of weight in a week.”

“Don't they feed you well?”

“Oh, you pick your own menu. And when do you pick it? You pick it for the following day when they bring your breakfast. How can you tell what you want to eat tomorrow when you've just finished eating? And they serve it at set times, all on a little tray. So you eat faster so your ice cream won't be all melted by the time you're ready for your dessert. And your coffee waits there on the little tray getting cold before you can get to it. Now I like a cigarette with my coffee. I'm not a heavy smoker, but I like to smoke while I'm having my coffee. But here, a cigarette is regarded like you're perpetrating a gas attack on the entire hospital.

“They wake you up in the middle of the night to take your blood pressure and temperature. And somebody comes around to take samples of your blood. And then an intern or the resident comes in to examine you. He listens to your chest, and he squeezes your belly, and taps your knees and elbows with a little rubber hammer. And it's usually a different one each time.”

“But your doctor—”

“Who sees him? He might come in once during the day, or in the evening to say hello, but everything is done by the interns and the nurses. It used to be that your doctor sat with you and talked with you. No more. You see him like a private sees a general.”

“Things have changed quite radically in recent years,” the rabbi remarked, “not least among them the practice of the professions.”

“You can say that again,” said Fisher. “Your own profession, for example. My father was sickly, and was in and out of hospitals for a good portion of his life, and not once did a rabbi come to see him. And we were living in Boston at the time, where there were any number of rabbis.”

The rabbi nodded. “But I'm sure he had plenty of other visitors. Visiting the sick is enjoined on all Jews, but here in Barnard's Crossing where Jewish practices have largely lapsed, the rabbi of the congregation is expected to do it because he's engaged, in part, to be the one practicing Jew. We also have a Visiting Committee who are supposed to—”

“Oh, yeah, some of them have been.”

“And family?”

“I don't have any family, Rabbi.”

“No children?”

Fisher shook his head vigorously. “My wife was a career woman and never got around to having any. Not that I was anxious for children at the time. I was—”