Tuesday The Rabbi Saw Red (25 page)

“I thought you didn’t care for him.” said Selma coldly.

“What’s that got to do with it? There are lots of people I don’t care for, so do I go around insulting them to their faces in front of a whole bunch of people? I’m not so keen on your old lady –”

“And you show it. You show it every single solitary time she comes.”

“I’ve never said a single goddam word to her that any reasonable person could call an insult.”

“Oh, is that so? How about the time she gave you that shirt for your birthday? How about the time she asked you to stop off at the drugstore and get that beauty lotion?”

“Now wait a minute. Just wait one goddam minute, will you? I’ve explained that dozens of times, all I said was that it wouldn’t do her any good. Those expensive lotions are just a big fake and they wouldn’t do anybody any good and she could put her money to better use, that’s all I meant, and as for that shirt. I just said – well, all I did was criticize the shirt, that’s no insult to your mother, and how about the way you treat my mother when she comes?”

“Look.” said Selma. “I treat your mother the same way she treats me. If she wants to come here as a guest she’s perfectly welcome, but a guest doesn’t go snooping in the refrigerator and she doesn’t make personal comments on my friends. My friends are strictly my business and I’m going to stand up for them, and Edie Fine has been my best friend for years, we went to school together and if someone says she’s married to a murderer and what’s more actually goes to the police and tells them he’s a murderer, when she’s pregnant and is supposed to stay calm and not get upset, well. I don’t care if he’s the rabbi of the temple or if he’s the Chief Rabbi of Israel. I’m going to show him what I think no matter who’s around.”

“How do you know. Clare? How can you know that the rabbi fingered this guy Fine?”

“Oh Mike, it’s known. Everybody knows.”

“But how do they know?” he persisted. “Who told you, for instance?”

“No one actually told me. I mean no one person I can think of, we were just sitting around talking. How do you know that Columbus discovered America? Somebody told somebody who told somebody. How did everybody know that it was the rabbi who got that Selzer kid off? Everybody knew it and nobody denied it, all right, the same way people know that he was the one that accused Fine.”

“Well, if Fine is guilty and the rabbi happened to know about it, isn’t he supposed to tell? Isn’t that what a good citizen is supposed to do?”

“Mike, how can you talk like that? A rabbi isn’t supposed to do things like an ordinary citizen. Rabbis and priests, people like that, don’t even have to go to court. I mean you can’t even make them go on the witness stand, that’s religious freedom. Besides, if the rabbi didn’t do it, why doesn’t he come right out and say so?”

“You got a point there.”

“Well, that’s what I mean. Now Selma Rosencranz is one of my best friends, she put it before the girls and we all agreed, and I’m not sorry.”

He shook his head in reluctant admiration. “I got to admit that broad Selma’s got guts. Still, it was kind of raw, getting up and walking out like that.”

“Look, as far as I’m concerned, this Fine is a snooty sonofabitch. I like Edie all right, she’s a nice girl, but as for that husband of hers…”

“You hardly know him.”

“I know him well enough, the big professor! Remember that political argument we had over at Al Kaufman’s house and how he jumped down my throat? He struck me as a downright radical, maybe even a Commie, and when you made some objection to something he said, he acted like you were some kind of idiot. Oh, very polite, and with high class, ten-dollar words, but anyone who disagreed with him got jumped on, well, after hearing his Commie talk. I can believe he could do it. You know, to them it’s not murder; they liquidate somebody.”

“Believe me, you got him all wrong.”

“Yeah, Well, if you want my opinion, if the rabbi fingered him he knew what he was doing, and this sonofabitch Fine is guilty as hell.”

“This is a way for Jewish women to act? For a minute I didn’t know what was happening. I thought maybe one of them got sick or something. I guess like me the rabbi didn’t know what was happening either, at first, then he couldn’t help knowing. So if he got angry, who could blame him? Let me tell you, in the same position I would’ve been mighty sore, anybody would, and I would’ve said some mighty nasty things, believe me. But not the rabbi, he stayed cool, he even smiled and made a little joke, he says everybody walks out after a sermon, but what kind of people walk out before?”

“So what was the joke he made?”

“That was it; I just told you.”

“Some joke!”

“Well, it sounded funny at the time, and everybody laughed. Look, it’s not whether the joke was funny or not. It’s that he could make any kind of a joke at a time like that.”

Gladys Lanigan handed her husband his gin and tonic and then poured one for herself. “I dropped in to the Shipshape for coffee this morning,” she said. “A couple of women in the next booth were talking and I couldn’t help overhearing.”

“Didn’t lean back and strain a little, did you?” asked Chief Lanigan affectionately.

“I did not!” She laughed. “They were talking loud enough so I didn’t have to. Seems that there was some trouble at the service at the temple last night, a group of women got up and walked out just as Rabbi Small was about to give his sermon.”

“They did? What for?”

“Well now, that’s something I couldn’t quite lean back far enough to make out. I gathered that these women were friends of the Fines, the one who was arrested for that Windemere business, they had some idea that it was the rabbi’s fault. Do you know anything about it, Hugh?”

He shook his head, mystified.

“Why do people do things like that?” she exclaimed. “And the rabbi is such a nice young man.”

“Just general cussedness, I suppose.” He shook his head again, but this time philosophically. “They want to get rid of him, and do you know why? Because he’s there, with them it’s not like with us, there are plenty of people who don’t like Father Aherne, but no one would think of trying to get rid of him, they wouldn’t even know how to go about it, that’s because he’s sent here by the archbishop and we don’t have any say in it, with them, they hire the rabbi and so they can fire him. But I’ll tell you one thing. Gladys, for all he’s so mild-mannered. David Small’s as tough as nails, and he’s going to stay here just as long as he wants to, there ain’t no one going to push him out.” He put down his glass. “I might stop by and see him tomorrow.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” she said quickly. “Why not?”

“Well, I gathered one reason they thought the rabbi had been able to bring it off was because he was friendly with you.”

He stared at her in angry disbelief.

Although it was the Sabbath, a time of rest and relaxation, of quiet rejoicing, when mundane thoughts and worries are supposed to be banished from the mind of the observant Jew, the rabbi had been abstracted all day, speaking scarcely a word to Miriam, and now, in the early evening, the Sabbath over, he went into the living room and was soon lost in a book.

“Do you think he did it?” Miriam asked in annoyance. “Roger Fine. Do you think he did it?”

He shrugged. “How do I know?” And he returned to his book.

“Well, aren’t you going to do anything about it?”

With a sigh of impatience, he closed his book. “What can I do?”

“At least you can go see him,” she retorted.

“I’m not sure it’s advisable,” he said. “Fine hasn’t asked to see me, and neither have his family here. What’s more, considering the unpleasantness before the wedding they’re not likely to, especially after this business at the temple last night. If they can spread rumors that I accused him or denounced him to the police. Lord knows what they’d make of my going to visit him at the jail.”

“You never used to care what people thought,” she remarked quietly. “You did what you felt you had to do, regardless of what people thought.”

“So maybe I’m a little wiser now,” he said cynically.

She looked up quickly. It was so unlike him, he caught her look and felt he had to explain. “I’ve never been exactly a howling success here in Barnard’s Crossing,” he said quietly. “At first I thought it was the fault of the congregation and that once they came around, everything would be all right. Each time there was a crisis of some sort – and there’s been one practically every year I’ve been here – when it was finally resolved. I’ve thought, now everything is settled and I can begin to be really effective. But then another crisis would arise. It was like that first car we had, remember? We had trouble with the ignition, and when we had it rewired we thought everything would be all right, and then the radiator went. So we got a new radiator and in less than a week the muffler let go, and then the transmission, and they wanted – what was it – two hundred dollars? Three hundred?”

“Three hundred is what we paid for the car,” she murmured.

“Each time something went wrong, we thought it was a fluke, and once it was fixed everything would be all right. But when you have a series of flukes, then it’s no fluke, then Murphy’s Law governs.”

“Murphy’s Law?”

“That’s right. I first became acquainted with it when I was a chaplain in the Army. Murphy’s Law states that if an accident or a foul-up can happen, it will happen. So after a while I began to think maybe it was I rather than the congregation.” He smiled ruefully. “You know the old Talmudic proverb: when three people tell you you’re drunk, go home and lie down.”

“So you’re going to lie down?”

“Miriam, if vow don’t understand –”

“I’m trying. David,” she said passionately. “I’m really trying.”

“Look, all the other times when I’ve had a row I’ve felt I had the respect of the congregation. While we differed on principles, at the very last they were respectful. But this – it was like a, well, a demonstration. Directed at me personally by my own congregation.”

“Some of those women weren’t even members of the congregation.”

“But some of them were.”

She was troubled. “Aren’t you trying to say that you are tired of the rabbinate. David?”

He laughed bitterly. “No. I’d like to try that sometime, too.”

“What do you mean?”

He got up and began to stride the room. “My grandfather was the rabbi of a small Orthodox congregation, he didn’t make little speeches to bar mitzvah youngsters, he didn’t get up to announce the page in the prayer book during holiday services, he spent his time largely in study. When anyone in his community had a question that involved their religion, they came to him and he researched it in the Talmud and answered it. When there was a dispute between two or more members of the community, they came to him and he heard all sides and passed judgment, and they abided by his verdict, he was doing the traditional work of a rabbi.”

“But your father –”

“My father was a Conservative rabbi. His congregation is old and established, they have a feeling and understanding of the function of the rabbi, and they trusted him implicitly, they didn’t go to him for judgment and they had no great concern for the kind of questions that my grandfather passed on. But they cared about their Judaism and they relied on my father to guide them in it.”

“Well isn’t that what you do?”

“It’s what I’ve tried to do. It’s what I would do if the congregation let me. But they buck me at every turn, at first I thought I’d gradually win them over and that I’d be able to serve them as my father served his congregation.”

“But –”

“But now I see that the rabbinate is not what I thought it was.”

She looked at him, he seemed so dejected.

“Everything changes from generation to generation. David,” she began softly. “You went into the rabbinate because you were inspired by the sight of your grandfather sitting in judgment. How about the doctor’s son who was inspired to go into medicine by the drama of his father sitting through the night with a desperately sick patient? He has to be a specialist now with office hours five days a week and Wednesday afternoons off. Instead of treating the whole man, he deals with a series of hearts and stomachs. It’s the same in the trades. When Mr. Macfarlane came down to fix the windows he told me his father had built the house they lived in single-handed, and during the winter, he made a lot of their furniture, too, and our Mr. Macfarlane, except for little odds and ends on the side, does nothing but lay floors, the methods change, but the profession doesn’t. Doctors are still concerned with healing the sick and carpenters with building houses and rabbis with directing the Jewish community and keeping it Jewish, and how about teachers?”

“I don’t feel that I’ve been any great success at that, either,” he said glumly.

“You’re talking nonsense!” She exploded. “You’re an excellent rabbi and an excellent teacher, too. You have trouble with your congregation because you’re a good rabbi.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“If you want to get along well with your congregation, if you want to be popular, David, you go along with them, instead of directing them and leading them. You don’t ever make them face hard truths, and if a teacher wants to be popular with his class he doesn’t try to make them learn anything.”

“Well, of course –”

But she could see that his mood had changed. So with a fine high scorn for logic, she said. “And you don’t have to go see Fine in jail, at least not right away. I should think you’d want to see this Bradford Ames first and find out the situation, after all, he owes you something for helping him with the Selzers.”

The rabbi considered. “I might try to see him.”

“Why don’t you call him right now, at home? There can’t be too many people named Bradford Ames, even in Boston.”

Ames seemed glad to hear from him. “I’d be happy to meet with you. Rabbi, as a matter of fact. I’m coming down your way tomorrow to close up our place for the winter. Do you know where it is?.. .Then I’ll expect you there sometime before noon.”

The Ames house was on the Point, a rocky finger of land jutting out into the entrance to the harbor. It was a large, white frame structure completely encircled by a wide verandah; on the harbor side it thrust over the sea wall, and at high tide over the water itself, giving the feeling that you were aboard ship. It was a warm. Indian summer day, and Bradford Ames was enjoying it from a large wicker chair on the porch when the rabbi arrived. “Come right up, Rabbi,” he said. “I thought we might sit out here in the sun while we’ve still got it.”