Snow in August (24 page)

“Maybe Jackie Robinson will have the same kind of dinner next year,” Michael said. “A seder.”

“If he lives in Brooklyn already, we tell him, Jackie, come here.”

“Wouldn’t that be great?” the boy said.

The rabbi tapped the
Brooklyn Eagle
. “See, he is coming to the other land of milk and honey. Brooklyn!” He balled his hands into fists and held them together
as if gripping a bat. “This year in Jerusalem!”

They both laughed. The rabbi hefted the package of American matzohs.

“To Egypt, everything goes back,” he said, opening the package, sliding out a matzoh, and handing it to Michael. “The matzoh,
for example. The Jews, when they get the news from the Pharaoh they can leave, they don’t want to give him time to change
the mind. But they don’t have time for the bread to—” He made an expanding gesture with his hands. “To get fat?”

“To rise.”

“Yes: to rise. So they grab what’s there already. Bread that haven’t rise. This.” He held up the cracker. “Matzoh.”

Michael took a bite of the long, wide cracker. It was dry and tasteless.

“A Hershey bar it’s not,” the rabbi said.

He opened a cabinet and lifted a brown paper bag off a shelf. He placed it on the table in front of Michael.

“For you,” he said. “For your mother.”

Michael looked puzzled.

“Bread,” Rabbi Hirsch explained. “Regular bread. What we find in the store here in America.
Hametz
, we call it.”

Michael peered into the bag and saw some rolls and slices of rye bread.

“The Torah tells us to take away—what is it called?—
leavened
bread, or
hametz
, from our houses during the eight days of Pesach. You don’t do this, you don’t really observe Pesach. And to make matzoh
even more important, the Torah tells us to find every scrap of
hametz
and scrub clean every part of the
house. Some holy men, they say
hametz
is like pride: bread that’s all big and empty, like—what’s the word?—puffed up.”

He smiled in a mild way.

“Not me,” he added. “Bread is bread, except at Pesach.”

He handed the bag to Michael.

“So this is a bag of
hametz
,” he said. “Still good. Give it to your mother.” He paused, as if trying to gauge the feelings of the Irish woman he’d never
met. “Or you can do something else with it, if your mother, she would be insulted.”

“She’s always worried about insulting
you
,” Michael said. “And she loves rye bread.”

“What a
meshuggeneh
world,” the rabbi said.

“Full of
meshuggeners
,” Michael said, preening slightly as he used the Yiddish in a casual way.

As the rabbi cleaned the stove and the floor, with Michael helping him move the furniture to get at hidden
shmootz
, he told him about the fine seders they would have in Prague, at huge oaken tables crowded with generations of the Hirsch
family. Michael could see the old people belching and farting on the couches and the children running back and forth, playing
a game about hidden
hametz
, and cousins flirting and friends courting. All that, as the rabbi talked: and the reading of the Haggadah and the Four Questions
and the dipping into the bitter herbs, all of them close and thinking they would go on for many more generations, the young
burying the old forever.

“That was a happiness,” the rabbi said. “All gone away.”

“Will you have a seder here?”

“Maybe next year,” he said. “We save up some money, maybe. Your mother could come, and you, and who knows? Maybe some from
the synagogue even.”

He tried to explain to Michael about how the last members
of the congregation, old and bent, would wait at home and be picked up by their cranky children, the children embarrassed
by the old people, and then be taken to strange places. Some of them would be flown to Florida. Some taken by car to New Jersey.
Some would go by train to Long Island. But they would not be here. They would not be where they were needed.

“
Nu
, by coming for a seder, they make all the hard part okay, the hard part of a year, the hard part of a whole life,” the rabbi
said. “We are all together, means we survive again another year.”

But nobody was coming this year, and Michael could feel the loneliness seeping through the room like a fog.

“Maybe you could come to our house, Rabbi,” he said. “Have a seder with us.”

“No,” Rabbi Hirsch said firmly, and then sighed and grew lighter. “Next year, here we have seder. And we send to Jackie Robinson
a note too.”

They talked a while longer, the rabbi scrubbing and dusting while Michael, for the first time, prepared tea.

“How come Passover and Easter come around the same time?” the boy asked. “You know, just before Opening Day?”

The rabbi smiled.

“Opening Day, I don’t know about,” he said. “But the other is simple. The Last Supper? You know, the famous painting? The
supper that it happened just before Easter?”

“Sure.”

“Well, the Last Supper, it was a seder,” the rabbi said. “Jesus and his friends were together to give thanks for the freeing
from Egypt.”

“You’re kidding!”

“No. So you better take this
hametz
home. The cleaning I got to finish.”

Michael lifted the grocery bag and went to the door. He paused with his hand on the doorknob and turned to the rabbi, who
was opening a box of steel wool.

“Rabbi?”

“Yes.”

“I have a question.”

“Yes?”

Two questions. Not one. Two. Ask. No, don’t ask. Yes, go ahead. Ask. Ask.

Michael took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and asked his first question.

“If God sent a plague against the Pharaoh to save the Jews,” the boy said, “why didn’t he send a plague against the Nazis?”

The rabbi was very still. His hands were limp against his sides.

“I don’t know,” he whispered in a voice powdery with despair. “I don’t know.”

He sounded like a rabbi who didn’t like God very much, and certainly didn’t love Him. And maybe didn’t believe in Him at all
anymore. Michael did not ask his second question. He did not ask what had happened to the rabbi’s wife.

O
n Easter Sunday morning, Michael kept looking at his reflection in the store windows as he walked along Ellison Avenue. The
priests told them at church that Easter was about Jesus rising from the dead, proving His immortality; everybody in the parish
knew better. It was about new clothes. And in his new blue suit, white shirt, striped tie, and polished black shoes, Michael
thought he looked older, more mature, whatever that vague word meant. Not yet a man, but no longer a boy.

He saw a girl named Mary Cunningham coming out of her building across from the factory. She was thin, with long brown hair,
and was dressed in a light blue coat and a straw hat with plastic flowers around the crown. She smiled at him in what he felt
was a new way. She was in his grade at Sacred Heart, but since the boys were separated from the girls at school, they only
saw each other in the schoolyard or on the street.

“Happy Easter, Michael,” she said, smiling. Unlike some of the other girls in his grade, she didn’t wear braces. Her teeth
were as hard and white as Lana Turner’s.

“Yeah, same to you,” he said.

“That’s a great suit,” she said.

“I like that hat too,” Michael said. “You going to mass?”

“Of course,” she said. “We have to go, right? But I gotta wait for my father and mother.”

His own mother had gone to the eight o’clock mass, which was all right with Michael. He didn’t want her walking him to mass
as if he were a first grader.

“See you there,” Michael said to Mary Cunningham, and moved along more lightly in the bright spring morning. Suddenly Mrs.
Griffin was calling to him from across the street. She was dressed in a tan coat and high heels and laughing hysterically.

“Michael, Michael, hey, Michael Devlin,” she shouted, looking both ways for traffic, then scurrying across to him. “You heard
the news?”

“What news?” She was more excited than she had been when the war ended.

“Your mother didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

“My horse came in!” she said. “What’d I tell you? You gotta have faith! And it was all because of you, Michael. You told me
your dreams, right? And we figured out some of them. But I couldn’t figure out that damned bowler hat. I thought about it
for days and nights. Then yesterday I’m looking at the charts in the
Daily News
, I see there’s a horse running in the third at Belmont, and get this: his name is
Bowler Hat!
I say to myself, I say, God used Michael to give me a winner! I knew it in my bones. I knew it in my heart! God says to Himself,
That Mrs.
Griffin, she needs a few bucks, she needs a gas stove, she needs some nylons. So He sends a dream through
you
to
me
. I run across the street, and I put five bucks on Bowler Hat with the bookie, and son of a gun if it don’t come in by a lengt’
and a half and pays twenty-two to one. I’m rich, Michael!”

She hugged him and put a bill in the palm of his hand.

“Keep the faith, Michael,” she said, “and keep on dreaming, kid.”

She pirouetted away and Michael opened his hand. A five-dollar bill. From a nightmare! He’d never had a five-dollar bill of
his own before, and his head filled with objects as he hurried on to mass: flowers for his mother, a box of chocolates for
her, comic books, maybe a hardcover book. Or he could give the whole five bucks to his mother to help save for a phonograph.
Or maybe he could have a date with Mary Cunningham. Take her for a soda. Or to the Grandview when his mother wasn’t working.
He’d never gone out with a girl, but he knew about dates from the movies and
Archie
comics and
Harold Teen
in the
Daily News
. And Sonny talked about the things you did with girls. In the balcony. In the park.

He turned into Kelly Street, skipping along, thinking about girls and the things Sonny told him about them and the mysteries
of their bodies. He wondered too what Mary Cunningham thought when she saw him in his new blue suit and what she would think
if he talked to her in Yiddish or quoted Latin from the mass. Would she think he was weird? Or would she think he was the
smartest guy she’d ever met? He wondered too what it would be like to touch her skin or play with her hair, and then wondered
if such thoughts were sins.

And then stopped near the synagogue as he heard a low, angry, keening sound. A sound of deep, hopeless pain.

He followed the sound to the corner, and there was Rabbi
Hirsch, his face the color of ashes, anger and grief clenching his jaws. He had a coarse towel in his hands and was violently
scrubbing the walls of the front of the synagogue. Someone had painted about a dozen red swastikas on the dirty white bricks.
The words
JEW GO
were daubed on the sealed front door. Even the sight of Michael did not ease his pained fury.

“How could they
do
this?” the rabbi shouted bitterly. “
Who
could do this?”

Michael put his arm around the rabbi’s waist, trying to comfort him, but the rabbi pulled away from the boy, seething with
anger, and grabbed the picket fence for support. Michael backed away, feeling wounded and stupid, but also fearful that the
wet paint would end up on his new suit. The rabbi reached for a mop and stabbed at the swastikas, smearing the fresh red paint.

“Wait here,” Michael said. “Don’t go away.”

He ran all the way to Sacred Heart, fighting a stitch in his side, ignoring the sweat that was dampening his fresh shirt.
Each time he faltered, gasping for breath, he saw Rabbi Hirsch in his mind’s eye, and rage urged him on. Outside the church,
the sidewalk was packed with people in flowered hats and new suits and newsboys selling
The Tablet
. It was as if the whole neighborhood were converging on the 10
A.M.
solemn high mass that was to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. Michael pushed through them, thinking, Move, goddamn it,
move, and took the steps two at a time into the church.

The nine o’clock mass was over, but the pews were almost full of those who wanted to hear the solemn high mass at ten, sung
by three priests. Michael glanced up and saw that the choirboys were already assembled in the loft. An usher tried to stop
him, but he pushed the man aside and hurried down the aisle and into the sacristy. He was relieved to find Father
Heaney sitting on a chair, smoking a cigarette, finished with his own duties. The three other priests were helping each other
don the gorgeous gold-embroidered white vestments used at Easter.

“Father Heaney!” Michael hissed. “Listen, there’s—I gotta—you have to—”

“Take a deep breath, kid,” the priest mumbled, “then tell me what you’re trying to say.”

Father Heaney listened as Michael told him the story, his voice hushed, to avoid distracting the other priests, who were busy
dressing, talking among themselves. Father Heaney’s face shifted. A deep vertical crease carved itself into his brow.

“I’ll call the cops,” he said, standing suddenly and going to the sink to quench his cigarette.

“No, you can’t
do
that, Father. The cops don’t care, we don’t ever call the cops, they—
we’ve
got to help him.”

“Why?”

Four alter boys suddenly entered the sacristy. Michael nodded hello. The altar boys went to the door leading to the altar
and waited. Out in the sanctuary, the choir began to sing. One of the priests glanced at the wall clock, said, Let’s go, and
altar boys and priests went out to begin mass as music surged around them. Father Heaney stood looking at Michael. His eyes
were more focused now, as if a film of indifference or boredom were being peeled away.

“We’re not cops,” Father Heaney said, when he and Michael were alone. Outside, the music soared. “Why should we get involved,
kid?”

“Because Rabbi Hirsch is a good guy!”