The Rabbi of Lud by Stanley Elkin Read Free Book Online

and cigarette papers are signs, of some still-to-be-fired destiny. We observed nothing, knew nothing, thought—if we even took time out to think—we lived in a booming metropolis and not only did not resent—the new rabbi, his young rebbitzin—the fact that we were being ignored but, God help us, actually believed that all the world loved a lover as much as we did, and actually appreciated people’s thoughtfulness—shameless, a rakehell, his hoyden—in leaving us free to fuck each other’s brains out. Our heads in our beds and still getting, we thought, settled.
    “My,” I might tell my Shelley as we promenaded Lud’s main avenue not only hand-in-hand but arm-in-arm too, and looking, I guess, like some fierce special team, “but I do so love it when an entire city looks like a mall. Oh, look, dear,” I might say with a snide, blue snicker, “it’s that little Jewish notions shop,” and elbow her ribs, blow in her ear, chew on her lobe, turning her round in the direction we’d just come, leaving no doubt what little Jewish notions had cropped up in this Jew’s head.
    The astonishing thing is that they stood for it. Charney and Klein. Pete, the stone hauler. Seels the vicious, anti-Semite tombstone carver. Any normal Luddian. Though their tolerance could have been an honest mistake. Shull and Tober, who employed me, whose funerals I officiated, reciting last words, drawing the characters of the dead from inference, the chancy observations of the bereft like witnesses to a crime, like the paltry consensus portrait of a police artist, say, cheerfully running one Jew after the other into the New Jersey ground, hadn’t even bothered to interview me but had hired me by return mail when I’d responded to their notice clipped from The Rabbinical Assembly Newsletter tacked to a bulletin board in the placement office of the old alma mama back in the Maldives. Maybe they assumed my gaga flirtation with my wife some arcane, peculiar heterodoxy. The others, Lud’s Fortune two dozen, probably took our open sexuality as an extreme example of Jewish clannishness. Whatever, it was live and let live in that little community of death.
    So if I say it wasn’t unknowingly you have to consider the source, and judge for yourself what does and doesn’t constitute knowing when the so-called knower is a horny, love-struck mooncalf.
    It was Shelley who took the call. In the screened breezeway—I won’t forget this, it’s as good an indication as any of the way we were—both of us called “the rabbi’s study.” (This wasn’t cynicism. We weren’t cynical. We weren’t smug or disenchanted or cocksure. I remembered everything Wolfblock ever taught me. I knew who was a pisher and who wasn’t. If we called the breezeway where we watched television and read the papers and sometimes made love the rabbi’s study, we had good reasons. We were three or four years into our marriage and still playing house. We had good hearts.)
    “It’s Mr. Pamella,” my wife said, holding the phone out and covering the mouthpiece. (You see? You see how good? It embarrassed me whenever she covered the mouthpiece on the telephone. I was mortified for the person on the other end. You see? You see how good she was, how good I had it? I thought this her worst flaw!)
    The florist wanted to know if I could take a funeral service the next day. This was strange enough on its own merit. I worked for Shull and Tober. They were the ones who contacted me for a service.
    “Lou,” I said, “tomorrow’s Saturday.”
    “Hey,” he said, “I didn’t ask for a weather report.”
    “It’s Shabbes. Jews don’t bury on the Shabbes.”
    “Maybe these people ain’t so religious,” Pamella hinted quietly. “Maybe these people are desperate characters.”
    Tober seemed nervous when I called, and asked if I’d stop by the funeral home so we could talk.
    Tober is one of those big, slack, gray-faced men in a black wool suit, a shambler in a vest and gold