The Frozen Rabbi (50 page)

They trod on each other’s answers, Mrs. Karp beginning again to praise the virtues of her exercise program while her husband claimed an absorption in business matters. Then a silence during which each, looking askance at the other, waited for their spouse to speak first, until both spoke simultaneously again.

“Pills,” asserted Mrs. Karp, as her husband admitted, “We visit the rebbe.” His wife gave him a subtle elbow to the kidneys, which he not so subtly returned. She swiveled toward him in a show of pique that just as quickly subsided, as she too confessed, “We visit the rebbe.”

The girl was dumbfounded and said so. Begging their pardon, she asked how they could bring themselves to take solace in the man who had wasted their boy. The wife shrugged her own puzzlement, then offered a muddled adage about forgiveness being the spice of life, while her husband declared almost defiantly, “He’s become like a second son to us.”

Taking heart from his impenitence, Mrs. Karp added, though still a little shamefaced, that they had recently begun discussing adoption proceedings. Then she leaned forward to touch the girl’s knee through the hole in her jeans. “You should go and see him,” she ventured, as if recommending a good beautician.

Horrified, Lou Ella muttered thanks for their hospitality, declined an offer of pralines and tea, and left their house abruptly thereafter. But while she dismissed Mrs. Karp’s advice out of hand (it was way weird), the conversation seemed to have awakened a latent impulse—because she did begin to conceive against all her better instincts a desire to visit Rabbi ben Zephyr herself. When the desire had grown to an urgency, she realized what should have been obvious all along: that she needed to go and ask him in person why he’d done what he’d done. What possible reason, she wondered for the umpteenth time, could he have had for icing her boyfriend? The answer would provide some “closure,” wouldn’t it, and wasn’t closure what everyone wanted? Though Lou had the sneaking suspicion that what she really wanted was to open the whole can of worms again.

She’d had to travel all night on the bus from Memphis. That was the only way she could make the connection with the van that shuttled the families of inmates from the nearby town of Wartburg (a gas station and a rusted threshing machine among weeds) to the prison. She’d been surprised, when she contacted the prison authorities, to discover that she was already on the rabbi’s visitors’ list, since she and the murderer had never formally met, but this was the least of the mysteries surrounding Bernie’s death. She informed her mother in the vaguest of terms of her projected trip, which got no more than a weary nod from Mrs. Tuohy, who complained she’d be stuck with Baby Sister all weekend. “Awrat,” sighed Lou, “I’ll carry her wi’ me,” though the truth was that she took comfort in the nearness of the mostly inanimate child. But when the searches began preliminary to the visit, she wished she’d left her little sister behind. It was bad enough, dreadful in fact, when the female guards began to strip-search Lou, making her remove her ballet skirt and tie-dyed underwear, snapping her thigh-highs and probing her private places under the supervision of a male CO. But that they performed a similar operation on Sue Lily, whom they handled like some big-boned glove puppet, was finally the limit. “We’re out of here,” she informed a matron, who ignored her, shepherding Lou and the oyster-eyed child into the hubbub of the visiting room.

Then she was seated before this poor excuse for an Ancient of Days, who offered her his cheesy red shoes, and suddenly the grief that had waited so long in abeyance chose that moment to well up and spill from her eyes. Across the table the rabbi gazed at her with a puppyish affection tinged with pity.

“Fuckwad,” said Lou, incensed at his presumption, “you don’t even know me.”

He raised his bristly brows. “I know by you your pupik tattoo and the taste from your tongue that you burned it one time in your gleyzl chocolate in the Dixie Café,” he said, leaning across the table so that a guard waved his baton between them to signal they should maintain the proper distance. “I know the journey of your soul from a guppy and the Island Mango air freshener you would spray in your room to hide the smell from the funny cigarette.” He was leaning close again, his breath reeking of the lard cutlet he’d had for lunch, crumbs of which clung to his beard. “I know how you trim it, the poobick hair.”

Lou cocked her head, transfixed, unable to tear her gaze from the fretted face that framed the old man’s limpid eyes, the light therein beaming some species of molten moonshine. Involuntarily she stretched a hand over the table to rap on his forehead, scored with wrinkles like a musical staff, and when in response he nodded slowly in the affirmative, she recoiled in disbelief. “You stink of treyf,” she accused, rummaging her brain for more ammunition to injure him with, resisting the fascination that wrung her heart. Shaking her head to rid it of nonsense, she repeated, “Why’d you rub him out?”

The rabbi extended the thoughtful blister of his lower lip. “Maybe I rubbed him in,” he submitted. “To his neshomeh I gave it the liberty to take up a new what you call it… a crib?”

Crib? She hesitated. “What was wrong with his old one?”

“It was stuck tsvishn tsvay veltn—between this side and the other. So I set him aloose.”

“Don’t give me that bull,” spat Lou, “I’m tired of all that hoodoo horse-shit. It’s as phony comin’ from you as it was from him.” Though she wondered at that moment which “him” she referred to. “There ain’t no world but this one and it’s already half in the crapper.”

“He was too much in it, the world,” said the rabbi.

“He wadn’t in it enough,” declared Lou.

The old man let go a sigh like a groan with wings. “That too,” he lamented, winking a watery eye, “that too.”

Anger roiled in the girl, who saw herself in a scene from one of those noir flicks she watched at the video store, one in which Madeleine Carroll as the murder victim’s moll removes a weapon from her purse to get even with his killer. But Lou’s purse held only her makeup, some Goo Goo Clusters for Sue Lily, and a copy of
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
, and besides she had no wish to hurt him anymore. On the contrary, once her anger had fizzled she found that she was strangely relaxed in the killer’s company, enjoying a tranquillity she told herself it was unforgiveable to succumb to. But the clamorous room no longer rattled her nerves; she might have been alone with him in, say, a parlor or the backseat of her mama’s Malibu.

Just then there was a disturbance at one of the other tables. The administrative officer had bolted from the dais to back up a couple of guards who’d confronted a standing prisoner and his female visitor. The two of them were protesting their innocence—the con combative, his companion fussing with her beehive even as she shouted poisonous oaths—while a guard claimed that the photos in the album they’d been poring over were backed with pressed sheets of crystal meth. When the officer made to confiscate the album, the prisoner—ropy biceps, teardrop tats in the corner of an eye—tore out one of the pictures and stuffed it into his mouth, which brought down the wrath of the provoked COs. Voices were raised, batons deployed, canisters of irritant dust sprayed in a scuffle that commanded the attention of the entire room. Lou herself had turned toward the fracas, only to have her attention recalled to the table that the rabbi had abruptly shoved from between them. Then, with an audible crackling of joints or crinoline, he lifted the girl onto his lap. Why didn’t she fight him? This was degrading, no? It was wrong in every category known to man: for there she sat in full view of the room astride the geezer’s knobbly knees with her back against his whistling chest, feeling a sizeable lump in his pants. Buttons were sprung and the lump released, which nuzzled her rump beneath her flounced skirt like a small animal seeking shelter, which Lou felt curiously anxious to accommodate. It occurred to her that she had primped for this occasion—for this “rape,” was it? The word hardly applied, though her underpants were pulled aside and her womb straight-upon filled, while the old perv gummed her earlobe whispering, “The Lord sm-m-mite thee, sweet m-maidl, with m-m-m-madness and astonishmum of heart.”

“Awrat,” Lou heard herself admit, “I’m sm-m-mitten,” cracking up over the delirium of her willing surrender as the two of them took flight.

With eyes closed Lou Ella saw everything through her organs and pores, each facet of her anatomy featuring at least five senses. What they observed, once her lover had irrigated her insides with his luminous seed, were the toppled walls of the prison, the mountains and the pillowy clouds above them, the harum-scarum rooftops of the shtetls of Paradise. She heard from a playpen somewhere back on earth the warbling of her baby sister in the tongue of nightingales, whose language Lou understood perfectly.

I would like to thank my agent, Liz Darhansoff, for her steadfastness; my editor, Chuck Adams, for his integrity; and the people at Algonquin for their good faith. I would also like to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for their generous support.