Snow in August (18 page)

“The cops came to the house. My mother made them leave. I didn’t say anything to them about anything.”

Suddenly Frankie’s hand came up and a four-inch blade snapped out at the touch of a button.

“You better not, boy. You better not say nothin’ to nobody. Not to that old Hebe up the block. Not to no priest. Not to your
mother. Definitely not to the fuckin’ cops. You do? Something bad happens to me? I pay back. That’s what Frankie McCarthy
does. Frankie McCarthy pays back. I know where you live. So does every one of the Falcons. I know where your mother works.”

Leave her out of this, prick, Michael thought, but said nothing.
Frankie smiled in a mirthless way. Then he closed the knife.

“You remember that, teach,” he said. “You remember what could happen, you teach the wrong shit.”

He flipped his cigarette butt into the alley, then turned and walked slowly to the corner. Michael reached for the wall and
steadied himself. His heart was thumping. He watched Frankie McCarthy cross Ellison Avenue and push through the steamed-over
glass door of the Star Pool Room.

“You prick,” Michael said out loud, using all those words he’d heard on the streets and almost never used. “You fucking shithead.
You cocksucker.”

All the way home, he wished he could summon the Golem.

A
t their afternoon sessions, Rabbi Hirsch said the words quickly in English and Michael returned them in Yiddish.

“Yes!”

“Yoh!”

“Thank you!”

“A dank!”

“You’re welcome!”

“Nishto… nishto…”

“Nishto far vos.”

“Nishto far vos!”

Rabbi Hirsch smiled. “Good, not too
goyish
.”

“It has to be
goyish
,” Michael said. “I’m a goy.”

“Maybe it’s true, that the Irish are the lost tribe of Israel.” Then deadpan: “What?”

“Vos?”

“This!”

“Dos!”

“Where?”

“Vu?”

“Here.”

“Doh.”

“When?”

“Ven?”

“Now.”

“Itzt.”

“Who?”

“Ver?”

“Now the numbers,” the rabbi said, holding up fingers as Michael said the words.

“Ains, tsvai, drei, fir, finf, zeks, zihen, acht, nein, tsen, elef, tsvelf, dreitsen…”

“Wait, wait, my shoes already I have to take off!”

The rabbi didn’t take off his shoes to count, of course; he made tea. Michael was wearing a yarmulke, a satiny black skullcap
that the rabbi had given him, explaining that some head covering must be worn in the house of God. This did not make him a
Jew; Rabbi Hirsch made clear that he had no interest in converting Michael to Judaism. Wearing a yarmulke was just a sign
of respect for the rules of this particular house of God. Michael told the rabbi that at Sacred Heart only the women were
made to cover their heads, while the men held their hats in their hands throughout the services, and the rabbi shrugged. This
made Michael wonder again why God had different rules for different people, but he didn’t say this to Rabbi Hirsch.

“Tai?”
the rabbi said, gesturing at the teapot.

“Zaiergut,”
Michael said.
“A dunk.”

While the rabbi prepared tea, Michael went to the bookcase
and examined some of the volumes, but he still could not read the alphabets. Rabbi Hirsch had explained some of the basic
characters, but they would not stay in Michael’s mind. This was a frustration, because after hearing the tales of the Golem,
he had come to feel that the books in their ancient scripts contained secrets he must learn. The alphabets of God, he called
them. The alphabets of the world.

He loved opening the volumes and seeing the beautifully designed pages; they were like the huge missals from which the priests
at Sacred Heart sang Gregorian chants at high masses. They gave him a similar sense of order and perfection and mystery.

“Later, you can learn to read,” the rabbi said, bringing two glasses of tea to the table. He moved an open letter out of the
way. “First, speak. Men first speaked, uh,
spoke
, and then later they wrote.”

“In the Ten Commandments, did Moses write like this?”

“Nobody know,” the rabbi said.

“Knows,” Michael said. “With an
s
at the end. Present tense.”

“Nobody knows,” the rabbi said, scooping three sugars into his tea, then handing the spoon to Michael, who did the same. “The
original tablets, they have not survive. They might be just, how do you say? A legend. Like the lost tribe…. Some say Moses
spoke Egyptian. He definitely didn’t speak Aramaic. That is the language Jesus spoke. We know that for sure. Aramaic…”

So it went until they had finished the tea. Then the rabbi glanced at the letter and said he had to go into the sanctuary
to recover a book. Michael followed him. The room was much smaller than the downstairs church at Sacred Heart, but to Michael
it had an even more powerful sense of the sacred. A
few weeks earlier in this basement sanctuary, Rabbi Hirsch had shown him the Ark, which contained the Torah scroll. That,
he explained, was the symbol of the Tradition, a word he often used to describe the kind of Jew he was: a follower of the
Tradition. When he said the word, Michael always heard it with a capital letter.

“All the centuries of the Jews?” the rabbi said. “Thousands and thousands of years? To this place, they are connected. That’s
what we Jews mean by the Tradition. That is what we have in a synagogue. Everything that ever happened.”

“Is the word
synagogue
Hebrew or Yiddish?”

“Neither,” the rabbi said, moving slowly through the pews, lifting prayer books, opening them to scan names, closing them.
“It’s Greek. This fact even most Jews don’t know.
Synagogue
is Greek! Amazing! It means, uh, uh, place of assembly in English. I looked up it.”

“Looked it up,” Michael said.

“Yes: looked it up.”

Michael loved these moments. The rabbi was a grown man, but he was always learning something new and becoming as excited as
a ten-year-old when he passed the new thing on to Michael. One afternoon, he spoke in an amazed way about the Constitution
and the Bill of Rights. Another time he discussed the building of the Brooklyn Bridge in the 1880s and how it changed New
York, linking Manhattan to Brooklyn forever. Knowledge made his eyes twinkle, his face seem younger. He paced about the tiny
room, he motioned with his hands, waving his fingers gracefully to describe music, making fists to express anger or passion.
About some things, of course, Michael was the teacher. American things. Baseball. Movies. Comic books. But most of the time,
the rabbi led the class.

On an afternoon like this one, Michael wished he could tell
his father about the things he was learning. His mother always listened patiently to his reports, but his father might have
been even more excited. If Tommy Devlin had come home, he could have gone to college on the GI Bill, which Michael heard about
from the rabbi.

“Imagine,” the rabbi said, “the son of a carpenter, a farmer, a policeman, he can go to the university! Like any rich guy!
Is a great country,
boychik
.”

Michael imagined his father sitting in the kitchen, studying his college books at the same table where Michael was doing his
homework. They could talk about how Judaism was the father of Christianity. He could tell his father about the synagogue and
its three purposes. It was a house of worship, just like Sacred Heart. It was a house of the people, where Jews could spend
time together. And it was a house of study. He wished he could explain all this to his father and let him know how sad Rabbi
Hirsch looked when he talked about it.

“Almost nobody to this synagogue comes anymore,” the rabbi said, waving a hand. “The Jews from around here? Dead. Moved away.”
That was why the upper sanctuary was kept closed, its doors locked and sealed. Michael had never seen it. “We have services
there? Everybody is lonely. And another thing: we don’t have the money to heat it up.” Most of the congregation now was composed
of older people, he said, who could not come easily to synagogue through the snow. “About Florida they are thinking more than
about God,” the rabbi said, “and who blames them?” He worried, he told the boy, that some Shabbos he would not have a minyan.
The Tradition insisted on a minyan—a minimum of ten males—before worship could begin. “Nine men and one woman? Not enough.
Not even one beautiful, intelligent woman. An old man with
no teeth and a very little brain is okay, but not a woman. Sometimes…”

He sighed in the face of God’s mysterious ways. Years ago, before Rabbi Hirsch came to Brooklyn, the upstairs sanctuary had
been filled. “The old people telled me this.” There were services on Wednesdays too, and the synagogue was packed
all day
on Saturdays. “How wonderful it must have be. Like Prague when I’m a boy. Now? Not so wonderful. Not in Prague. Not here.
I pray and pray but this does not become a house of the people. Not full of singing. Of praying. Of laughing. And you and
me, we are the only ones who study.” He shook his head. “The rabbi and his Shabbos goy.”

Now Michael wandered to the back of the sanctuary, where double doors opened under the stoop on MacArthur Avenue. There were
three locks and a plank wedged into two angle irons to keep the doors from being forced open from the other side. Hebrew tablets
were cemented into the walls. And in the right-hand corner there was a narrow oak door.

“Where does this door go, Rabbi?”

“Upstairs.”

“Can I see it?”

“No, is closed,” the rabbi said. “Well, someday maybe.” Then he stopped, a book in his hand. “Ah, here is the book. Greenberg,
Yossel.” He smiled. “Just like the Golem.”

Michael came over, his stomach suddenly queasy.

“What’s his name?”

“Greenberg.”

“That’s Mister G.”

“You know him?”

“I was there when he was beaten up.”

“You were there?”

“Yes,” Michael said, and then realized he might have said too much. He turned away.

“Is very sad story,” Rabbi Hirsch said. “His son writes to me a letter. He says his father is in—the word is coma? Yes. But
maybe also he is given up on the life. He says Greenberg just lies in the hospital in the dark. The hospital, it don’t help.
His head is broke and hurts all the time. Tubes are in his arms. They give him medicine. They feed him. But Greenberg never
says nothing. The son, to me he writes a letter that says maybe his father’s old prayer book will help. The son, he says maybe
the book will make Greenberg open his eyes.”

Michael remembered the old man holding his head, the blood slippery on his fingers, the cash register held in the air, the
breaking sound when it landed, and the shards of broken glass and ruined
Captain Marvels
on the floor. He remembered Mister G lying in his own blood. He remembered Frankie McCarthy’s sneer. The rabbi stared at
him.

“Did you tell the police who done it, this beating to Greenberg?”

“No.”

“Why?” the rabbi said softly.

“Ich vais nisht.”

“You don’t know
why
?”

Michael tried to face the rabbi, but gazed instead at the walls and the low ceiling.

“I can’t tell the cops,” Michael said. “Around here, you don’t tell the cops anything. They’re like, I don’t know, the enemy.
And I’m Irish, Rabbi. I talk to the cops, I’m an informer, and my mother says they were the worst people in Ireland.” He struggled
for control, pushing the image of Mister G’s bloody face from his mind. “Around here, they call an informer a rat, or a squealer.
I talk to the cops, and I get found
out, they give me the mark of the squealer. They cut your cheek all the way to your ear, they—”

“You can’t tell the police in secret?”

“No! I tell them and don’t give my name, they do nothing. I give my name, they make me a witness, and then everyone knows
my name. Look, I gotta go.”

He started to walk out past the low railing. The world was suddenly blurry. Michael trembled, afraid he would cry, afraid
he was about to lose Rabbi Hirsch.

“Wait!” the rabbi called after him.

Michael paused, and the rabbi came to his side.

“I didn’t tell you go to the police,” he said. “I want just to know why you didn’t.” He paused. “Now I know. You’re, what’s
the word? Scared.”

“Yes.”

“Of the man who did this to Yossel Greenberg?”

“Not just him.”

“Who else, then?”

“Everybody.”

“Your mother?”

“No.”

“Me?”

“No.”

“So there’s two people. Already we know it’s not everybody.”

Michael tried to smile, but his eyes were full of tears.

“Michael, you are a very good boy,” the rabbi said. “You are kind. You are a worker, I can see. But you are young. You have
not already learn some of the hard things in the life. One very hard thing? You keep quiet about some crime, it’s just as
bad as the crime.” He paused. “Believe me. I know.”

F
or two days, Michael walked on other streets to avoid the synagogue. The rabbi’s words moved in and out of his mind, even
while he sat in classes at school.
You keep quiet about some crime, it’s just as bad as the crime
. He thought about talking it over with his mother. If he told the cops, would he really be an informer? He answered himself:
Yes. Besides, if he talked, she’d be in trouble too. They might try to hurt her. They’d have to move. To go somewhere else.
Maybe she’d even take him with her back to Ireland. Far from Sonny and Jimmy and games on the street and the Dodgers in Ebbets
Field. Far from home. But suppose someone in Ireland heard about what he’d done? They might end up in even worse trouble.

At night, in his dark room, there was a jumble of images as he tried to sleep: Frankie McCarthy’s knife, Mister G’s broken
head, Rabbi Hirsch’s steady gaze as he asked him to explain his silence. What was done to Mister G was a crime. No doubt
about it. So what was his own silence? To get rid of the faces, he tried to conjure other images, from comics or movies. But
Frankie and Mister G and the rabbi kept returning. And then Custer appeared in his mind, right out of the West, and he sat
again with his father in the balcony of the Grandview, and wished Tommy Devlin could be there to tell him what to do.