Snow in August (38 page)

He waited in the dark vestibule for a long moment and decided not to switch on the lights. The police knew that Rabbi Hirsch
was in the hospital; if they saw lights burning, they might come in and find him. I don’t want to see the cops, he thought.
It’s too late for them. It’s too late for all of them.

He went up the three vestibule steps and unlocked the second door and entered Rabbi Hirsch’s small apartment. He set the bag
down and in the dim light moved books on the top shelf of the bookcase, behind the radio and the photograph of Leah. There
he found the second key. It was about four inches long, made of iron, and heavy. It was attached to a painted wooden stick.

Michael used the key to open the tall oak door in the corner. The door that had never once been opened by Rabbi Hirsch in
Michael’s presence. At first the unlocked door would not open. He had to pull it hard, using all of his weight, until
it squeaked on rusted hinges. Before him, a dusty stairway rose into darkness. His heart beating quickly, Michael went up
the stairs, feeling his way near the top, thinking for just a moment that he should turn back, until he grasped the handle
of another door. He turned it and shoved hard. The door made a scraping sound on the stone floor.

There before him was a great, vast, high-ceilinged room, illuminated by colored shafts of light from stained-glass windows
and slashing bright beams where sections of glass had been punched out. He was in the abandoned main sanctuary at last, and
the sight filled him with awe. The downstairs prayer room was like the downstairs church at Sacred Heart: low-ceilinged, plain,
dusty, the pews full of prayer books. But this was like entering a secret room in a lost city.

He walked carefully along the wall, stepping over broken plaster and shards of smashed stained glass and stones that must
have been hurled at the windows. He counted twenty-one rows of benches. There were prayer books at odd angles on every bench,
some of them gnawed by rats. Thick cobwebs draped from the benches to the floor. The words
KHAL ADAS JESHURUN
were carved into the marble above the shuttered double doors that had once been the main entrance. Above the entrance was
a balcony, like a small version of the choir loft at Sacred Heart.

Michael stood there, facing the sanctuary, trying to imagine what it had been like during the Holy Days when every seat was
filled and there was a rustle of anticipation and wonder. He could see faces. He could see clothes. They had come here, assembled,
embraced, and then left, some of them never to return. There must be places like this, he thought, all over Europe. In the
feeble light, he could see on the far wall the carved wooden Ark where the Torah once was stored. It was
huge, four or five times larger than the Ark in the basement sanctuary. Past the glass chandeliers, he could pick out the
ner tamid
, the eternal light, hanging from the ceiling, its candle no longer lit. And in the center, just as Rabbi Hirsch had told
him, was the
bimah
, the speaker’s platform.

Standing there in this desolate emptiness, from which even God seemed to have fled, Michael began to weep without control.

He wept for Rabbi Hirsch with his broken face and his losses and journeys and endless grief. He wept for Leah Yaretzky. He
wept for Sonny and Jimmy. He wept for Mister G. He wept for all those bony people he’d seen in the newsreels, staring with
dead eyes past the barbed wire. He wept for his mother, who had crossed an ocean to escape hatred and found that it followed
her like a wolf. He wept for Father Heaney and Charlie Senator, who had gone to their own diasporas. He wept for those people
who long ago had come here to this holy place to celebrate their survival and good fortune and then had moved on once again.
And then he wept for his father. Who was taken from the balcony of a movie house to the snows of Belgium, carrying with him
the memory of a waltz on the polished floors of the Webster Hall. Carrying a picture of his wife. Maybe even carrying a picture
of me. Oh, Daddy. Oh, Dad. Please help me now.

He lost all power in his legs and slid down the side of one of the benches and sat weeping on the dirty floor.

He wept until he had no more tears to weep.

And then he stood up and gathered himself. After all, he had work to do. Work that he now believed only he could do. And Shabbos
began the next day at sundown. So did Frankie McCarthy’s party.

He went to the
bimah
. The raised platform was covered by
a dark purple cloth that was speckled with plaster and water stains. He pulled the cloth aside and saw the wooden platform
that Rabbi Hirsch had described to him from his hospital bed. Sunk into the wood was an iron handle. He pried it up with his
fingers and then lifted. A door opened in the top of the platform. Below him in the darkness was a long, deep, tiled structure
that resembled a sink, complete with a water tap and drain. On the floor of the sink was a gleaming wooden box, shaped like
a coffin. About two feet long. Tied with rough twine. Michael felt his skin pebbling in awe and fear. “It’s true,” he said
out loud. “True.” The box once handled by Rabbi Loew had survived the centuries and then had been taken by runners and couriers
from Prague to Palestine and finally to this building in this parish in Brooklyn. And here it was before him. He held the
railing of the
bimah
to steady himself and then he reached down for the box. For such a small object, it was heavy, as if many things had been
compacted inside its burnished wood. He placed it on the edge of the
bimah
.

Then he realized that the cords that tied it shut were almost new. The box had lain in its dusty attic for centuries, but
someone had opened it in recent years. There were holes spaced three inches apart around the lid, and indentations in the
wood, as if a claw hammer had been used to remove nails. Below the lid, the smooth sides of the box were rough in five or
six places, perhaps from prying by a screwdriver or flat chisel. And in his mind, Michael saw him: saw Rabbi Hirsch, while
the Nazis were marching through Prague, watched him opening it, and, yes, witnessed him falling to his knees in despair as
he failed to do what he wanted to do. He thought: I must pray, so I don’t fail. He untied the knots. He slipped the cord off
the box and then gazed at it for a long moment. He
lifted the lid. He was certain then that he could smell the mists of Prague.

Lying on top of a piece of crumbling purple brocade was the silver spoon. It was dull and tarnished in places, but Michael
could see the Hebrew lettering on the handle, and felt the same eerie chill that Rabbi Loew must have felt when it was handed
to him by Emperor Rudolf. Beside the spoon, in a small ceramic box, was the curled parchment. The
shem
. They’re here, Michael thought, just as Rabbi Hirsch whispered they would be. After their long journey, they came to rest
here. In this abandoned room. Waiting until they were needed. Waiting for me.

Michael picked up the long-handled spoon, feeling weightless and formless, as if the bones had vanished from his body. The
thick silver spoon must have weighed three pounds. His hand trembled in wonder. He rubbed his thumb over the Hebrew letters,
and he felt suddenly connected to the distant past. I am as old as the world, he thought. I have seen many things. He wanted
to pray, to speak in a thousand languages at once, to express some nameless feeling of connection to the nameless man who
had cut those letters in some nameless place across the seas. He tried to conjure a face. He tried to invent a name. Neither
would come to him, as the silver spoon shook in his hand. And he thought: No man carved these letters. These letters were
carved by God.

He gripped the spoon in both hands to stop the trembling and then held it up, like an offering, to the empty Ark and its unlit
eternal light.

A
cross the long, broiling day, Michael made nine more trips to the hill beside the Quaker cemetery. Around two o’clock, he
went home to assure his mother that he was all right. He had a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch and washed it down with iced
tea. After she left to look once more at the garden apartment in Sunset Park before going on to work, Michael rushed to the
park. It was after dark when he carried his last load of dirt into the synagogue on Kelly Street.

He poured each load of dirt into the long, flat sink, packing it loosely with his hands. After the last bagful was transferred
into the sink, he sat down hard on a dusty pew. He was so drowsy that he felt as if he were underwater. I need a nap, he thought.
Just an hour, stretched out on this empty bench. Just to rest. Just ten minutes. Five. But then he imagined waking in the
gray dawn, and his mother panicking and the police searching the parish for him. He couldn’t let that happen. No. He stood
up straight and slapped his cheeks to come fully alert, and
thought of the great, ballooning shape of Rabbi Hirsch’s battered face. No: I have to sleep at home tonight. In my own bed.
I need to be strong.

The upstairs sanctuary was now very dark, its spaces illuminated only by light from the moon. He looked at the
shem
, waiting in its ceramic box. The spoon lay hidden under a pew. Everything is ready, he thought, even me. But it was time
to go home. After all, this was still only Thursday. He had one more day to do what must be done. One more day until the party
for Frankie McCarthy. On Shabbos.

At home, he soaked in the bathtub and scrubbed away the traces of dirt under his fingernails. He went to bed before his mother
came home, and in spite of the relentless, clammy heat, he fell swiftly into a dreamless sleep.

When he woke on Friday morning, the bed was marshy with sweat. He could hear the radio from the kitchen and his mother’s voice,
singing happily along with the Ink Spots on a song called “The Gypsy.” He pulled on his white baseball pants, as instructed
by Rabbi Hirsch, and his white socks and sneakers and a white T-shirt. But he felt strange and dreamy. His mother’s familiar
voice made him think that maybe none of this had ever happened. She sounded as she always did in the mornings before Frankie
McCarthy walked out of the snowstorm into Mister G’s. Everything else was the same: his chair, his bureau, the cabinet full
of comics, the window that opened to the fire escape. Was he really dressing in white, for purity, to spend a day summoning
a living creature from dirt? Was he to be like Dr. Frankenstein? He lived in the real world, not in a movie. Then he saw the
piece of his plaster cast adorned with Rabbi Hirsch’s precise Hebrew letters. He picked it up and kissed it reverently. Everything
had happened, all right; all of it.

“Good morning, young man,” Kate Devlin said cheerfully,
poking a spatula into a frying pan on the stove. He mumbled a good morning and stepped into the bathroom to throw cold water
on his face and comb his hair. He left the door open while he washed. Everything was familiar.

“You had yourself a sleep, didn’t you?” she said. “It’s almost ten o’clock.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Slept like a rock.”

He closed the door and urinated and washed his hands, examining the bathtub for signs of dirt from the park. There were none.
When he came out, Kate had laid three slices of French toast on a plate on the table. He sat down, slapped butter on the fried
bread, and sprinkled sugar over the top. He ate greedily.

“Well, it’s done,” she said, explaining her cheerfulness. “I rented us a place. The one with the garden.”

“You’re kidding!”

“No, we’ll be in by the middle of August, so we’ll have to start packing tomorrow.”

“But you’re still working at the Grandview?”

“For now,” she said. “Tonight for sure. But there’s an opening out at the RKO in Bay Ridge. Just great luck.” She gazed out
the window at the summer haze. “We’ll be out of here soon. It won’t be soon enough.”

Her voice mixed with the radio, a tune called “The Anniversary Song.” Al Jolson. He heard a phrase about how the night was
in bloom though a word wasn’t said. Kate was talking about getting boxes from Roulston’s grocery, and how he could begin packing
his own things on Saturday. But he didn’t even try to imagine the move, the new apartment, a garden. He was thinking only
about the night ahead.

“Sometimes bad times are really for the better,” she said.
“We can throw out a lot of junk, and—” She noticed his clothes and smiled. “You’re dressed to play ball!”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Up the park.”

His plate was already clear, and he got up to wash it in the sink and place it in the drainer.

“You’ve made it up with those two so-called friends?”

“Well… I don’t know. I’ll just try to find a game.”

“Be careful with that leg, now,” she said.

Off he went, wearing his
I
’
M FOR JACKIE
button as a badge of defiance. He took the long way to the synagogue. Walking fast on what felt like a brand-new leg. Off
to Kelly Street. Through the door. Into the upstairs sanctuary.

Then he started to work at the long, deep sink, murmuring the instructions from Rabbi Hirsch as if they were part of the mass.
He ran some water and stirred the dirt and water with the long silver spoon to make mud. He stripped off his shirt and trousers
to keep them clean, because later he had to be dressed in pure white. Then he started shaping the mud. A torso. Arms. Legs
and feet. A head. Stepping back to be sure the proportions were right. Shaping the details of the face with the handle of
the heavy spoon. Making an opening for the mouth. Dividing fingers and toes.

He was on the banks of the Vltava. He was waiting for fog. He imagined a red moon. His sweat splashed into the mud. Hours
passed as he refined and refined his work. The light in the sanctuary shifted with the sun.

When he was finished, he walked as instructed to the four corners of the sanctuary and gathered dust and dirt in his hands
and sprinkled it over the mud. As the mud dried, he smoothed the rough spots on hands and face until he could refine them
no more. Then he went to the loft above the front door and found a worn, paint-spattered wooden stepladder. Right where Rabbi
Hirsch said it would be. He carried it down to the sanctuary floor, bumping into walls in the tight stairway, knocking a wooden
collection box to the floor. He carried the ladder to the front of the sanctuary, opened it, and adjusted the brace. He climbed
up the rungs, as the ladder swayed and creaked, and lit the fat, squat candle of the eternal light with a wooden match. A
soft, golden light immediately suffused the room.