Read Online The Rabbi of Lud by Stanley Elkin - Free Book Online Page B

to me, than the known proscriptions of his circumscribed life, all that last-fling riot and disorder, the whirlwind sexual spree and rampage of his ladies’-man, precelibate years. Maybe it was melodramatic, but I’d felt a little like that back in the cemetery explaining Jake Heldshaft to Connie, mentioning Sachs and Haas and Stan Bloom and the others to her for the first time. Now, with my remark that I hadn’t always been a rabbi, and my gratuitous digs about her mom, it seemed to me that it was as if I’d told Connie she was adopted or suggested, boasting, some prepriestly, wild-oats past. It was a wrong footing, clumsy, almost drunken.
    I’d felt rotten since the Kaddish at the Puffy Pisher’s graveside and had been trying to call Al Harry Richmond in Chicago. Al Harry was the sort who kept up. If anyone did, he’d know what happened. But when you’re a professional grief administrator like myself you’re always running into problems of measurement, issues of proportion. You have to give them their money’s worth over a eulogy, touch their hearts without breaking them, as one of the holy men back in the Maldives put it. Also, you never know how much anybody knows. It’s the beginning of politics. So when I finally reached Al Harry I was all bluff, hail-fellow congeniality and cautious, red-alert pussyfoot.
    “Son of a gun,” I told him, “it’s a blessing from Eternal-Our-God just to hear your voice again. Your voice is a sight for sore eyes, Al Harry. It’s been way too long. Way too long. Remember the South Side? Remember the minyan? Remember old Wolfblock? Those were the days, hah? Carefree and gay. Not like today with all our responsibilities and what-with-one-thing-and-anothers. Say,” I said, “I’m something of a Wolfblock myself now. Our-God-and-God-of-Our-Fathers saw fit to make me a rabbi in Lud, New Jersey. Maybe you knew that. Well, the other day, the strangest thing. I was walking through this graveyard and I came across a marker for a Jacob Heldshaft. Remember Hebe Heldshaft, the Yiddish Mockeybird? Well, this one out here has a birth year that would be just about the same as Jake’s and I was wondering, well, do you think it could be the same fella? You hear any talk about He-Who-Is-Most-Merciful taking him out?”
    “That’d be Jake all right,” he said. “Throat cancer.”
    “Throat cancer? The thrush?”
    “His falsetto did him in.”
    And went on to tell me that Sachs, Haas and Marv Baskin were also history.
    “What? No!”
    Stan Bloom, who was still alive, he said, had been diagnosed as having a rare and dangerous blood disease. The trouble with people who keep up is just that. They get the bad news first. I felt awful. I was even a little jealous, if you want to know. I was the rabbi here, I was supposed to be the guy with the backstage access. Hearing all this gave me the same sense I sometimes get in Sal’s about how underemployed I am. Never mind that four of us were already out of the picture, never mind that Stan Bloom was apparently down for the count. Other things troubled me. I’d turned into this hick. Sowing my indifferent dead into the ground like a sort of truck farmer.
    “Listen,” I told my old friend, “I’m glad we had this talk. Your news is terrible. It’s hard to take it all in. Jesus, Al Harry, the Jewish Nightingale was a falsetto? The Puffy Pisher wasn’t a natural soprano?”
    “Heldshaft? He wasn’t even a natural tenor.”
    “I’m going to pray for Stan Bloom’s blood count,” I told him.
    “Sure,” he said.
    “I’m going straight to Creator-of-the-World with this one.”
    “Do what you have to.”
    “I’m the Rabbi of Lud!”
    “Kayn aynhoreh.”
    “What, you think Gracious God is just going to stand by when He hears about this one? In the old days, in the minyan, in the old days He wouldn’t even let us catch a cold!”
    “Tell Him.”
    And I did. I dug out my phylacteries and prayer shawl and squeezed my eyes tight shut