GRISHA LED YUSSEL OUT TO THE ABSOLUTE BRINK OF A DESERT night. Yussel didn’t make conversation with Grisha. His head was splitting. He was nauseated. This would be a terrible place to die of altitude sickness, pulmonary edema, all that. Also he could die from fear, from no sidewalks, from the dark, from the big cat claw marks he’d seen on his first visit, from the snake holes the size of his thigh. What would Shoshanna live on if he died in the next ten minutes? Yussel scared himself so much he had to talk to Grisha. “So, you had a problem about a woman singing? I haven’t heard anything.”
“She’s out. She’s sleeping. You’ll hear.”
“I don’t want to hear, Grisha. Nobody should hear.”
“It’s Ernie’s job to turn on the new speakers you gave us, but he falls asleep.”
Cold moonlight waxed the ridges of the corrugated roofs, the sides of the Navajo tents. The sky was a wall, stars buckshot all over it. Where were the clanging buoys, the waves, the drunks and lovers under the boardwalk, the shouting, the horns, the fire engines? A tall wooden water tower sang old oak songs in the wind, sounded like his father’s table hymns. Candles flickered inside Ernie’s little adobe house, through the pale skins of the towering tents. Chickens cackled from somewhere behind the tents. Yussel smelled feed and shit.
“Babe’s chickens on your right. We’re getting a slaughterer once a month from Wyoming, from the Federation. The mountains are on your left. There’s a dirt road out there. It cuts across the flats to the foot of the mountains. You’ll see it in the morning. Babe’s bus is out there in the trees. And her new Lincoln. You should see her Lincoln.”
“Somebody’s following us, Grisha.”
“Probably Babe. She doesn’t want to miss anything.”
“What if it’s not Babe?”
“Then she’ll miss something.”
A girl pulled up the flap of a tent, ran out to them, stuck her hand out. She was shivering in the cold air. “I’m Alma. I made the tents.”
Yussel leaned backward to avoid her touch. “Alma, I don’t shake with such pretty girls.” Chaim had pencils for such occasions. On the pencils was written DIAL-A-JEWISH-STORY with a phone number in Far Rockaway. Yussel had seen a lot of Chaim’s pencils all over New York. A lady puts out her hand to shake, Chaim sticks a pencil into it. And doesn’t have to touch her.
Yussel heard whispering from the tent. “He’s a hunk, like a bull.” “More like Alex Karras with a beard.” “I think the guy on ‘Barney Miller’ with the curly hair, a little bigger.” And then in a significant whisper, “I say he looks like Moses.” And everyone fell quiet.
“God, I am so embarrassed.” Alma was rubbing her hands together.
“So now you know for next time.”
“I knew your mom in San Francisco, Rabbi. I mean she was older than me but I sort of knew guys she knew.”
“My mother?”
“Yeah, LaDonna.”
Yussel’s ears turned red, fiery. Possibly other things also. He could see the Flower Child LaDonna with the cloud of curls rising behind her, straddling a Harley, straddling a Hell’s Angel, wearing a HARVEY MILK FOR MAYOR T-shirt. Guys she knew? Who names a kid LaDonna? No schoolteacher from Pretoria. Maybe the railway man from Oneonta. No one Jewish, that’s for sure. So the Flower Child was a convert. Imagine. Yussel imagined.
Her mother was someone from a dump like Cedar Rapids, someone who runs away from home, takes the Trailways to L.A., works at McDonald’s, has yeast infections, abortions in clinics, a kid out of wedlock, names her LaDonna. Nice going, Totte. LaDonna/Madonna makes herself over, reverses the course of religious history, becomes a Rebbitzen. “Oh. My stepmother. You must mean my stepmother.”
“Yeah, LaDonna. Well …” She giggled. “Hasta mañana.” Alma ducked into the tent. Giggling exploded into belly laughs.
“Shah!” Grisha hissed at them.
Guys she knew. Alex Karras. The guy in “Barney Miller” with the curls. Women in a tent, giggling, thinking he looked like a football player, Moses for God’s sake. Yussel knew what he looked like: a big peasant with a long beard.
“Craziness,” Yussel said to Grisha.
“They have to get married soon. Maybe some kibbutzniks who want American citizenship.” Grisha led Yussel to his tent. “Look, Yussel, no matter what goes on between us, you, me, Babe …” Grisha cleared his throat, sighed a long moist sigh, spat. “I just want to say, to tell the truth, okay? We’re happy you came.”
“This your tent?”
“Before Babe made me move inside the house.” Grisha gave Yussel his flashlight, went in, lit a candle. Guys she knew. Yussel didn’t want to go in, didn’t want to be alone with himself, with the flagpole whacking off in the wind, with the terrible sharp loneliness of all things.
“I want you to know, Grisha, just so there’s no misunderstanding, no false expectations, just to tell you the truth, I’m not happy I came at all. And probably I’ll leave in the morning. You can hire someone cheap out of Yeshiva.”
Grisha said, “Listen, Boychickl, maybe it’s the altitude the way you feel. Shluf. Sleep.” Grisha sighed his long moist shuddering sour sigh, shuffled away into the dark.
Yussel sat on the edge of the bed, listened to the dark, listened to his heart pumping in his ears, wondered if he’d strangle in his sleep, turned the flashlight on. The sheets were clean, so was the pillowcase. God knows how old the blankets were. Yussel didn’t like sleeping in another man’s bed, especially Grisha’s. Next to the bed on the floor was a milk crate and on it a basin of water, a towel to wash his fingertips off in the morning, because sleep is one-sixtieth of death and you have to wash it away. In Grisha’s bed sleep might be closer to death than one-sixtieth.
“Yussel? You sleeping?”
Yussel leaped up.
“I won’t bother you, if you’re sleeping.” Babe talking from the side of her mouth.
“Babe, if I was sleeping you wouldn’t be bothering me.”
“So am I bothering you?”
“I’m not sleeping.”
“I want to give you a little advice.”
“I thought we agreed—”
“From me we agreed you wouldn’t take money. Anyway I’m doing this for your mother not for me. Okay. Listen…”
“You want me to come out, Babe.”
“No. I’ll stand here in the dark.”
“I’ll come out.”
“You don’t want to come out. I can’t come in.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re my mother’s age. You can come in.” He knew she wouldn’t. Yussel lay back on the bed. The mattress sighed a long moist shuddering sour sigh. Everything smelled like Grisha. “I’m listening.”
“You’re not coming out?”
“Why should both of us freeze?”
“Okay. Listen. Chaim’s here.”
“I know.”
“You heard about his house?”
“It burned?”
“It didn’t burn. Why did you say such a thing?”
Yussel shrugged.
“Worse, Yussel, believe me. Chaim’s gabbai, Mendl, from Rikers Island, has a brother-in-law, a real-estate agent, a real goniff. He sold Chaim’s house in Far Rockaway. Next door to your house. It was worth three hundred. He listed it for two and sold it seven times to seven families, who thought it was such a great bargain they dropped dead to sign up fast. The brother-in-law has now a million, four. Moving day, seven vans pull up on your street. Furniture goes in, furniture comes out. Men fighting, kids fighting, women crying, and Mendl’s brother-in-law vanishes with the money.”
“Nebbuch.”
“I know. It’s terrible. That’s why I’m telling you. I’m not sure. So Ruchel and the kids, who were supposed to live off the money from selling the house while Chaim’s getting settled out here, she has to go to her mother. So where’s the money? So where’s Mendl’s brother-in-law? So how does Chaim have enough money for eighteen houses in Moffat, Colorado? I ask you. What’s the connection?”
Yussel got up and went outside. “Chaim wouldn’t let his wife and kids go hungry if he had the money. I don’t think so.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“What are you telling me, Babe?”
“As your mother’s closest and dearest friend, I am telling you you should steer very clear of your friend Chaim. Go daven, but that’s all.”
Yussel pulled back the tent flap and went inside. “I promise.” In the morning he’d steer clear all the way to Rockaway.
Yussel refused to think about Chaim. He tried to sleep but inside his eyes the Flower Child was riding around under his eyelids like a circus performer on a motorcycle, upside down, round and round, in the double rings of both closed eyes. He tried to squeeze her away. He blinked, she went round and round. Outside, the flagpole beat at itself, girls giggled in the night. He was glad he was married. An unmarried man would be tempted out there. He didn’t want the girls to think about him, to talk about him; he didn’t want to think about them. God forbid he should smile at them. He closed his eyes. The Flower Child was back, under both eyes, going in different directions. Guys she knew. The desert air was dropping to winter temperature. It was sharp, bit inside his nose when he breathed deeply. He resisted thinking about guys she knew. He resisted thinking about resisting, which led him directly back to her and the women giggling about him in the tent, fifteen, twenty yards from Grisha’s tent, talking about him. “Shh, he’ll hear!” He’d leave first thing in the morning, before anyone else woke up. He thought about his father, his father and the Flower Child, his father. directly back to her and the women giggling about him in the tent, fifteen, twenty yards from Grisha’s tent, talking about him. “Shh, he’ll hear!” He’d leave first thing in the morning, before anyone else woke up. He thought about his father, his father and the Flower Child, his father.
It had been some kind of emergency, some kind of tzuros, everybody up in the middle of the night. Maybe his father had been sick or Yussel was sick or his mother or Bloomke gained a pound. Yussel remembered being much smaller than the door. Maybe he was seven, eight. He remembered standing at the bedroom door; his father stood at the closet reaching for something. A light was on in the closet so it must have been Shabbas. There was no light on in the bedroom. Yussel saw a flash of his father’s thighs, white with blue veins, little, thin, delicate, like veal, but between them his father’s member, raw, large, red, determined, wet, glinting, pornographic, although he did not then know such a word. Maybe he was nine, ten. No more. Boys, sons, even in the Torah, shouldn’t look on their father’s nakedness. Yussel remembered shutting his eyes, dizzy between the blue-and-white weakness of the thighs and the secret red power, like some terrible fruit, of his father’s member.
Yussel decided then and there he could never be a man like his father, would never want to be burdened with such a thing, with its rules, its demands, its prohibitions, its evil inclinations, which he’d already heard about in cheder. He imagined walking around with such a thing, putting it in the right place, trying to turn around in a phone booth, changing a tire, going through a subway turnstile. To make children with such an instrument, to make generations, to sin. Such dilemmas, such choices.
He imagined then moments like these in the tent, the son equally fruited as the father had been that night long ago, girls giggling in the other tent, the Flower Child zooming around under his eyelids. LaDonna/Madonna and the guys she knew. Yussel rolled over, looked up into the point of the tent, smelled Lemon Pledge. His father towered above him. His doors touched the high roof of canvas. He wore creamy silk pajamas with little interwoven CD’s for Christian Dior and a brown cashmere robe with gold-and-silver trim around the neck and sleeves. “To faint from such a bathrobe?”
Yussel groaned, pulled Grisha’s moldy pillow over his face.
“I have to tell you something.”
“I only see liars in the morning.”
“You think we have a shuttle bus?”
Yussel buried his head with his arms and the pillow. The candle flickered, died, renewed itself like a joke birthday cake candle. His father’s shadow leaped and shrank along with the candle, across the four walls of the tent, four fathers, eight doors, one son trying to hide himself and his thoughts. His father sat down on him. The candle flickered, burned bright. The doors were killing Yussel, their points in his heart, his groin. Every place he had ached, he now ached worse. His father lay down beside Yussel, folded his doors, put a thin arm around Yussel, his head on Yussel’s big chest, almost as a woman would. Yussel gave him some blanket, a little pillow.
“Oy gevalt!” The steam of his breath quivered in the air, bent the candle. They lay together for a long moment without speaking. Even if his father betrayed him, lied to him, ruined him, this was as beautiful a moment as Yussel could remember in his entire life.
“You comfortable, Totte?”
“Here? Sure.”
“And there?”
“There? There, Baruch HaShem, I weep to enter the Gate.”
“For that you thank God?”
“Who else should I thank?”
“You visit Mom?”
“She’s still sore. She won’t listen.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It works out. If she doesn’t listen to me, I don’t have to listen to her.”
“Somehow that’s not funny.”
“I know. It never was.” His father blew out the candle, settled in deeper.
The Flower Child no longer zoomed around under his eyelids. The girls no longer laughed in their tents. Yussel decided not to ask whether his father visited the Flower Child. His father pulled the blanket from Yussel, snuggled.
“I’m not staying.”
“They were out of line. It’ll work out.”
“They couldn’t even call me Rabbi?”
“They’re still mourning for me. Give them time.”
“What am I doing here if I’m not the Rabbi?”
“Yussele, maybe for a nice Reform synagogue in Santa Fe for nonobservant Jews, maybe for them you’re a rabbi, do a little service, a lot of weddings, talk politics on Shabbas. But for us you have an uncircumcised heart. You aren’t attached. Somehow Babe and Grisha know this. Subliminally.”
“They know they can’t make me suffer?”
“They know you don’t feel their pain. A real rabbi feels pain. I told you. The hiccups.”
“I don’t want their pain.”
“So why should they call you Rabbi? When your heart is broken, then you’ll be a rabbi.”
“Maybe I don’t feel pain, but God knows I’ve sacrificed a lot to come out here, to help. They don’t even think I’m here to help them. That little gem I hold you responsible for.”
“How could I get them out here if they thought it was because they were insufficient? I had to give them a cause.”
“And you had to give me a cause. So what’s true? Who’s insufficient? Me or them?”
“Let me tell you a story.” Yussel’s father took his beard in his right hand. “The first Bobover Reb, this is about him. He’s eating a fish. A Hasid comes up to him with a request his barren wife should have a child. The Bobover holds the fish in his hand and he tells him a story. He doesn’t give the Hasid to eat. He just gives him the story. He tells him that there were four young men who were very poor. They wanted to make a trip for the holidays to Lublin to stay with the Seer but they had no money for food, horses, lodging. So they decide if one dresses up as a rabbi and one dresses up like his attendant, they’ll get rides, what to eat, where to sleep. So they dress up. And it works. They are welcomed at an inn. They are given fine rooms, good food. Then the innkeeper comes to the Rabbi, weeping, and says his little girl is very sick, could the Rabbi help. The four young men look at one another. The one who is making believe he’s a rabbi knows he has to go to help, although he knows he has no power to heal because he’s only making believe. But how can he say no? So he goes in and leans over the little girl in the crib and says prayers. So he prays to HaShem to make the little girl better. Then he goes as fast as he can to his room, tells everyone to get dressed fast and get out of there. On the way out the innkeeper runs after the four and gives them money, he is so grateful. They finally get to Lublin to the Seer and spend the holiday with him. Then it’s time to go home. On the way home, they pass the inn, although they dare not stop there. The innkeeper runs out. They are so scared. He tells the make-believe Rabbi that his child is well, thank God, and he is so happy. He insists they come in and let him give them a fine supper and fine rooms. What can they do? They eat and sleep like kings. In the morning the innkeeper gives the make-believe Rabbi money.
“This is all too much for the other three. They want to know what happened, maybe their friend is a rabbi in disguise. What did he do? What did he say? Finally he says, ‘I don’t know any more than you do. But when I went in and saw how sick the little girl was, I said to myself: “You’re a fake. But the innkeeper, he’s a Hasid, he’s a good man, he believes. Why shouldn’t HaShem do something for a good man? He doesn’t have to do anything for me. I’m worthless. But this innkeeper who is weeping and this child who is dying, for them He could do something. So I said a few prayers. I don’t know any more than that.’
“So the Rabbi, who was still holding the fish, told his Hasid, ‘I’m a nothing but you’re a good man. Why can’t HaShem do for you?’ And within the year the Hasid had a child.
“So, Yussele, give it a year. Maybe you don’t have to be a rabbi the way they think you should. You can still heal the baby.” Then his father rolled over, snapped his fingers at the candle, which relit itself, leaned over Yussel, and ripped a hair from inside Yussel’s nose. “All stories are true. Even my lies.”
The pain rode up his nose, exploded like horseradish through the universe of his head, his body. He rocked over the pain, held his nose, said through it, “What did you do that for?”
His father stood above him, holding the single hair between thumb and forefinger like a treasure in the light of the candle. “I’m bringing it back. See, I’ll tell them, my son feels pain. Believe me, my son’s okay.” His shadow slipped upward into the point of the tent, disappeared.
Yussel could still feel the thin arm across his waist, his father’s tired head resting on his shoulder. And then, because he couldn’t stand to think about where his father had come from, where he was going back to, Yussel, a pious man, a married man, allowed back into his head, into his bed, into the hollow where his father had been, the Flower Child in her HARVEY MILK FOR MAYOR T-shirt and the guys she knew and he was the guys she knew and he felt the hot honey of his teen-age days pouring into the wounds his father had left in his soul and then he really couldn’t stand himself. So he washed, said prayers, got back into bed again, thought only of Shoshanna’s little hands stroking his forehead. Sometime that night he dreamed something large was sliding over his waist where his father’s arm had been and that the something large curled into something round and slept next to him for warmth.