Sunday the Rabbi Stayed Home (3 page)

“Dear Miriam,” she read aloud. “Welcome to Binkerton and Mass State, Western Division. I hope you followed instructions and didn’t bring food. Everything is prepared – a complete Sabbath meal and enough for the weekend. It’s all in the refrigerator, and all you have to do is heat it up. Pilot light doesn’t work on left front burner. Use matches (in cupboard over stove)… Kiddush wine in dining room sideboard… meat dishes – blue edging – in cupboard on the right as you face kitchen windows… meat silver also on right – floral pattern… meat pots and pans in right cupboard… dairy utensils all on left… when washing dishes, watch out for kitchen faucet – squirts sideways when turned on full… arranged for baby-sitter – Kathy (15 and very reliable) next door, No. 47, daughter of Prof. Carson, Math, and very nice… feel free to call them if you need help of any kind. Extra blankets – top shelf bedroom closet… Bob attached side rail to Rachel’s bed for Jonathan… No automatic switch for lights on Friday night. Bob and I are not that Orthodox. If you are, leave them on all night… Our good friend. Prof. Bill Richardson, Philosophy Department, was much taken with David’s paper on Maimonides. He is holding open house in David’s honor Saturday night. Did Bob mention it to David?”

Miriam poked her head in the living room and viewed her husband lying on the couch with affectionate annoyance. “David!” she called sharply. “Sit up.”

“I took my shoes off.” he protested.

“And how about your jacket? It will be all wrinkled for tonight.”

“I’m wearing my black suit tonight. This will smooth out when I hang it up.”

She sighed. “Did Bob say anything about a party Saturday night?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, there’s going to be one in your honor. A Professor Richardson is having open house.”

This time the rabbi swung his legs over and sat up. “I don’t think I care for that. Besides. I was planning to drive back to Barnard’s Crossing. I all but promised Mr. Wasserman.”

“But it’s for you, Nancy says. We’ll have to go.”

At the Maiden bowling alley the manager reported a cracked plate-glass window. “It must have happened during the night, Mr. Paff. Everything was all right when I closed up. Then when I came to open this morning –”

“How come you opened this morning? Where’s Hank?”

“Oh, yeah. I was going to tell you. Hank called me at the house and asked me to open for him. He wasn’t feeling so good.”

“Was he drunk?” Paff asked quickly.

“Gee. Mr. Paff. I wouldn’t know about that. He just called and asked could I open and take the day shift. So I said all right. You know, he took my shift one night last week when I had that twenty-four hour bug.”

“All right. Get a wide piece of adhesive tape and tape that window up on both sides so there won’t be any chance of it shattering. I’ll notify the insurance company. Maybe they’ll want to come out and take a look at it before I fix it.”

“Sure. Mr. Paff. I’ll do that right away.” the manager assured him. “And can you get someone for the evening shift? I’ll stay on if I have to, but it’s a long day.”

“Did you call the office?”

“I called, but there was no answer.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot. I let the girl have the day off. All right. I’ll swing by there and get the list and see what I can do.”

At the Melrose alley Paff noticed that the gold leaf on the window sign was chipped and peeling near the corner. It made the golden bowling ball, which was the company’s trademark, look like a reproving eye.

“When did that happen?” he asked the manager, pointing to the sign.

“What? The sign? It’s always been like that, Mr. Paff.”

“I never noticed.”

“The pinsetting machines in the last two alleys got stuck again, Mr. Paff.”

“Did you call the mechanic? You got the number.”

“Yeah, I called him yesterday and again today. He says he’ll be right over, but he said that yesterday.”

“When did you call him today?” Paff asked. “This morning, first thing when I came in.”

“So call him again.”

“Oh, I’ll call him, but in the meantime we can’t use the alleys.”

“Those mechanics!” Paff shook his head. “Say, would you like to work an evening shift tonight – over in Maiden?”

“Gee, Mr. Paff, I’d like to help you out, but the missus got something planned for tonight.”

Business was off at the Medford alley. “It’s this new billiard parlor that opened up in the shopping center,” the manager explained. “Everybody’s suddenly gone crazy over billiards. Even the dames. They come there and knit – can you imagine, knit? – waiting their turn to shoot.”

Paff asked if he was free to work the evening shift over in Maiden.

“You mean instead of working here? You planning to close this place down? Just because business is off for a couple of days?”

“No. I mean just for tonight, to sub.”

“Oh, sure, anytime at all. Glad to help you out. Of course. Fridays I can’t. I got this j ob Friday nights…”

He swung over to Chelsea, where his office was located, and only after he had finally found a place to park did he realize that he didn’t have his office key.

The janitor was a new man and didn’t know him.

“Look, here’s my car license. See, I’m Meyer Paff. What more do you want?”

“Yeah, but you’re asking me to open the office of the Golden Ball Enterprises. There’s nothing on your license, mister, that shows you’re connected with them.”

Paff bit his lip in annoyance, although strict justice forced him to admit that the janitor was right. “I’m just going to make a couple of phone calls,” he said. “You can stand right there while I do it.”

“Sorry, mister, I got orders. The management is mighty strict about it. There’s been a lot of breaks.”

Paff tried to keep his voice calm. “Look, is Dr. Northcott still in his office, or has he gone to lunch? You know, the dentist on the third floor.”

“I didn’t see him go out.”

“All right, take me up to him. He’ll tell you who I am.”

The dentist showed his annoyance at being called away from his patient, but he identified him.

It sure has been one of those days. Paff thought as he riffled through the card file. He dialed a number and sat with the instrument pressed to his ear as the phone rang and rang. Finally: he hung up and dialed another number. Again, the phone rang without eliciting a response. The third call, the phone was answered immediately. It was a woman. “No, Marty ain’t home. Who shall I say called?” He didn’t bother to explain.

With the next call, he was lucky. “I figured I’d be hearing from you, Mr. Paff. Hank called me on account I subbed for him a couple of weeks ago, and I said okay.”

“Fine. Now look, there’s a broken window, and I had Ted tape it with adhesive tape for the time being. I want you to check it before you close to make sure that tape is nice and secure. Okay?”

On his way out he stopped to thank the janitor and commend him for his caution. He pressed a couple of cigars on him.

“Thanks, Mr. – er –”

“Paff.”

“Oh, yeah. Well thanks, Mr. Paff. I won’t forget next time.”

When he got back to his car, it was jammed in between two others. By the time he had extricated himself, he was bathed in perspiration. I’m getting too old for this, he thought. Then he remembered he hadn’t had lunch. Glumly, he passed a nearby restaurant, noting the lot was full. He decided to eat on the road and stopped at a diner, where the only stool vacant was in front of the grill. Morosely watching the short order cook in a dirty apron, he managed to consume a dry hamburger and a cup of bad coffee.

In the Officers’ Cafeteria of Hexatronics, Inc., on Route 128, there was a long middle table where the executives usually ate family-style, while on the sides there were a number of booths available for those who had guests and wished to talk in private. In a booth, Ted Brennerman studied the menu and said to his host, Ben Gorfinkle. “Hey, you guys do all right for yourselves.” He gave his order, and as soon as the waitress left, he leaned across the table. “As I was saying, Ben, there’s thirty-seven guys with nameplates on their seats in the sanctuary; there’s another fifty or sixty get the same seats all the time – figure a hundred altogether. The rest of us – the peasants – sometimes we get a seat up front, and the next year we’re way out in left field someplace. Last year I sat in the last row. So what difference did it make? With the public address system, I could hear just as good. But there are plenty others who don’t feel like I do. They want to sit up front.” He was a tall, good-looking young man, eager and with a ready, infectious smile.

“But they paid a special price for those seats. At least those with the nameplates did,” Gorfinkle pointed out.

“Don’t you believe it. I checked into it. I went back to the minutes of the general meeting of five years ago. What happened was they were putting on a drive for the Building Fund and getting all kinds of pledges. Then Becker, who was president that year, said that anyone who would donate a grand could have his seat reserved from year to year. Now, that wasn’t anything the board had decided on and voted on. It was during the meeting and came out on the spur of the moment, if you see what I mean. Then” – he pressed Gorfinkle’s arm for emphasis – “the board at their next meeting had to make some ruling to get Becker out of the jam he’d got himself into. So they said that those who had come forward with their thousand-buck donation would have their seats held until the last day of the ticket sale each year. But then the very next year they stopped selling seats anyway and made it part of the annual membership dues, so it seems to me that those guys don’t have any kind of a claim on those cushy seats that they get year after year. And I’ll tell you another thing: Not all of those guys who had nameplates put on their seats gave their thousand bucks.”

Gorfinkle, a stocky, square-faced man in his mid-forties, said. “One of these days, we’ll be putting in theater-type seats. Maybe we ought to wait till then.”

“Nussbaum’s project?” Brennerman laughed. “He came to see me right after I was elected president of the Brotherhood. I should have the Brotherhood start a drive for the additional money to put in new seats. And he spoke to me again only last week. He’s bugged each of the Brotherhood presidents for the last four years, and the Sisterhood, too. I told him it wasn’t anything I thought you could work up any enthusiasm for.”

“I don’t know, they’re mighty uncomfortable. And we’ve got the money for about half the job.”

“Yeah, it’s a shame to think of that money lying there, and we can’t touch it. Boy, if we could use that for the Social Action Fund! Say; maybe Mrs. Oppenheimer’s will could be interpreted so at least we could use the money to buy upholstered pads for the present seats,” Brennerman suggested.

Gorfinkle shook his head. “That wouldn’t do any good. It would just make the seats higher, and they’re too high as it is. It’s not so much the seat part as the back. It’s so straight or something. The only one who likes it is Doc Klein, the osteopath. He gets more leg cramp and sacroiliac business after Yom Kippur than he gets all year round.”

Brennerman laughed. “Who picked that type seat in the first place?”

“Nobody picked it. They were so overwhelmed – most of them, those same people with the seat plates – by the reputation of that architect that they let him do whatever he wanted. Those were copied from some old English church. I understand. What did he care? He was just interested in how it looked; he wasn’t going to have to sit in them. It’s funny about this seat business. In the shul that my father used to go to, where you sat was a big deal. By tradition, the big shots, the guys withyiccus status, always sat down front. The nearer you were to the ark, the more important you were. In that shul they even had a row of seats up against the wall where the ark was, facing the rest of the congregation. I remember the guys that sat there, most of them old guys with long beards, wearing these long woolen prayer shawls. My father called them p’nai. Gosh. I haven’t thought of that word in years. It’s a Hebrew word, and it means faces. My father used to explain to me that they were the faces of the congregation, the most pious and the most learned.”

“Well. I don’t suppose we have any of those in our congregation unless maybe old man Goralsky and Wasserman.”

“I think maybe Meyer Paff thinks he’s one.” Both men chuckled.

“One thing bothers me, though.” Gorfinkle went on. “I still think that this kind of thing – announcing a whole new social action program for the temple – ought to be presented at the general meeting of the congregation. When you come right down to it, we haven’t even formally presented it to the board.”

“Hell, we campaigned on it. Ben. So it’s no secret. And since we’ve a majority, we’ve got a right to run things our way.”

“Still –”

“And don’t you see.” said the other eagerly, “presenting it at the Brotherhood service – that’s the beauty of it. For one thing, we’ll have more people there than we ever get at a general meeting. The last meeting we only got a little over a hundred. We get close to three times that at the Brotherhood service. And with the rabbi away, we won’t have to worry about anything he might say afterward.”

Gorfinkle chuckled. “And he doesn’t know it yet, but he won’t be there for the meeting Sunday either.”

“No? How come?”

“Well, he expected to drive home right after the evening service Saturday, but they’re having a kind of party for him Saturday night at the college, according to Stu. He won’t be able to leave until Sunday morning. After all, they’ve got the kid with them.”

“Good thinking.”

“But it’s not the rabbi I’m worried about; it’s Paff.”

The younger man grinned. “Well, don’t worry about Paff. I’ve got an idea how to take care of him.”

There were no customers present, and Meyer Paff looked around uncertainly for a moment and then made his way to the rear of the store, where Mr. Begg sat glowering at him.

Tm Meyer Paff,” he said. “Mr. Morehead said you had the key to the Hillson place, that you were like a caretaker –”

“I live in the carriage house. I keep an eye on the place.” said Begg evenly.