All day my grandfather had busied himself finding reasons not to accompany Uncle Ray to “Night in Monte Carlo.” He was not ready to mix with “regular people.” He was uncomfortable making small talk with strangers. He lacked the funds and the appropriate attire. He had no use for synagogues. He would just get in his brother’s way. Each of these reasons, with the aplomb of a born dialectician, Uncle Ray discounted, dismissed, disarmed, or batted to one side. He appreciated the challenge a return to civilian life must represent, he said, but in the end you just had to hold your breath and jump into the pool. Nobody, apart from traveling salesmen and the people who accosted you in bus terminals, was comfortable making small talk with strangers. He would happily stake my grandfather for the evening, to be repaid by the winnings or at a later date. He owned a very nice blazer, Harris tweed, that was much too big in the shoulders for him. A synagogue, when you came right down to it, was only a building; great Jews from Abraham to Hillel had never laid eyes on one. And everyone, by design and almost by definition, was in a rabbi’s way.
When the time came to leave for the synagogue, the only card my grandfather still held was to make himself disagreeable. Pick a fight and hope to be uninvited.
The problem with this approach was Uncle Ray’s satisfaction with himself and his opinions. Whatever position you adopted, Uncle Ray alighted on higher ground. Attacks on his person or character could have no basis in fact; the kid just laughed them off. My grandfather hit him with surliness, scorn, wet-blanket inertia. Uncle Ray floated effortlessly above it all. But in the parking lot of Ahavas Sholom, as they were about to get out of his brother’s brand-new Mercury coupe—Ray already had his door open—my grandfather, in his desperation to give offense, stumbled at last on a viable approach.
In the winter of 1947, no one—least of all Uncle Ray—was conscious of the creeping unbelief that afterward began to trouble my great-uncle and ultimately led him to exchange his pulpit for the pool halls and racetracks of Baltimore, Wilmington, and Havre de Grace. My grandfather seemed to have picked up on some early vibration of the crisis to come. From childhood he had suspected Uncle Ray of faking “the whole ‘boy tzaddik’ thing,” to gain the attention and approval first of their parents, then of the greater Jewish world. A sibling’s ESP guided my grandfather’s hand as it reached for the quiver, let fly the shaft.
“You don’t see the irony?” he said. “‘Night in Monte Carlo’? You don’t see how disingenuous that is? The whole joint’s already a fucking casino, Ray. A sideshow tent. Remember, upstairs from Pat’s Steak, that crew came in and opened a betting office? Those grifters from Buffalo who fleeced Frank Osterberg? That’s you. You’re running a wire store. Taking bets on races you’re never going to have to pay off because you already know the result. The marks come in, you take their money. Promise them what, forgiveness, eternity, a line item in God’s account book? Then you just sit back and wait for the blow-off. Give them a few last words of mumbo-jumbo, plant their chump bodies in the ground.”
It was a long speech for my grandfather, who felt his argument take on more weight and conviction as it carried him along. Uncle Ray eased shut the driver’s-side door with an angry punctilio. He twisted around in his seat to face my grandfather. His elbow mashed the Mercury’s horn. His freckles vanished into the overall redness of his face. “How dare you?” he promisingly began.
With that opening horn blast and an encouraging flicker of guilt in his eyes, Uncle Ray mounted to the saddle of his high horse. He cited the humble piety of their long-suffering parents and grandparents, the good deeds and intentions of his congregants, the faithfulness and martyrdom of Jews the world over, the integrity of the rabbinate, the accomplishments of five thousand years. From there he moved on to Maimonides, Hank Greenberg, Moses, Adonai. Evidently pleased with the effect it made, he pounded the horn a couple more times for emphasis. At one point he grew so heated that his saliva flecked the lapel of the Harris tweed jacket my grandfather had borrowed. But then, having instanced the Lord God of Hosts, Uncle Ray paused. He narrowed his eyes. My grandfather, he realized, had offered no resistance or counterarguments. He just sat there with spiderlike patience, letting Uncle Ray rage.
“You almost had me.” Uncle Ray grew calm, his tone measured. “You are coming in there with me,” he said, “and you are going to be glad that you did. And do you know how I know you’re coming in there with me?”
“How?”
“Because that is the Holy One’s plan for you.”
“Oh, really, God has a plan for me? About goddamn time.”
Home a month, my grandfather was out of work, depressed, and scuffling. His college degree had been gathering dust for six years. His experience in Europe qualified him for nothing that was legal in peacetime. His Philadelphia homecoming had seemed to disappoint all participants, in particular his parents, whose keenest disappointment lay in discovering that, despite the captain’s bars and the decorations for actions he could not discuss, they were still disappointed in him.
“Everything that has happened to you in your life before now,” Uncle Ray said, “was part of the plan. And tonight it’s all going to come together and make sense.”
“You know this.”
“I do.”
“God slips you the inside dope.”
Uncle Ray ran his hand along the tuck-and-roll upholstery under his thigh, his smooth chin adorned with the minute smirk of a man with a fix in.
“Christ, you are so full of it, Ray!”
“Yeah? So let’s make a bet,” Uncle Ray said. Only moments after his pious outburst, along the very lines my grandfather had employed to needle him, my great-uncle pointed unwittingly toward the exit door through which he and the custom Brunswick pool stick would afterward pass. “Five hundred dollars says you walk into that shul, in the first half hour—no, in the first ten minutes—the Holy One’s plan for you will be revealed. The reason you needed to show up tonight.”
“What horseshit,” my grandfather said. “Brother, you are on.”
His discharge pay had been snarled in red tape, and he didn’t have anything close to five hundred dollars, but he figured you had to like his odds.
*
My grandmother turned toward the doors of the reception room, curious to see the new-crowned princeling of Jewish Baltimore. She caught a glimpse of a slender young man in a navy blazer with buttons like gold coins. Under a velvet yarmulke, also navy blue, he wore his ginger hair half an inch too long. Entering the room, he was mobbed by a group of men (among them Judge Waxman) who teased and fussed over him like uncles ushering a virgin nephew into a brothel. The rabbi was soon lost from view. Mrs. Waxman coughed up a Yiddish imprecation or description of what lay in store for her husband when they got home.
“I don’t know,” my grandmother heard the rabbi say. He was making a show of reluctance, letting the men pull him by the wrists into the room. “Gentlemen, I have my doubts.”
As he was swept, redolent of gardenia, past my grandmother, she heard him apologizing for his tardiness. “It wasn’t my fault,” he said. “Blame my date.”
“The brother,” Mrs. Zellner said. She sounded doubtful of the identification, as if the visible facts did not conform with what she had been told. “A decorated war hero.”
My grandmother saw my grandfather lingering in the hallway outside the reception room, looking as if he harbored doubts far graver than his brother’s. He kept his hands straightjacketed so fiercely in his pockets that they had begun to pull open the fly of his trousers. His knit necktie was ill-knotted, and his brown tweed blazer, worn over a chambray shirt that needed ironing, was too tight at the shoulders. Everything—the music, the lights, the rattle of wheels and dice, the outbursts of joy or disgust from the tables, his clothes, his skin—seemed to fit the man too tightly. Only his eyes had found a way to escape. They leaped to my grandmother from the hollows of his face as though from the windows of a burning house.
“He could stand a little more decoration,” said Mrs. Waxman.
*
For all the resistance he had put up to attending that evening’s event, my grandfather had given no thought to what it would be like when he got there. It was worse than he could have imagined. “Night in Monte Carlo”! A sequined half-moon, swags of ten-watt stars, paper carnations and potted palms, all carted in to cloak machinery that had been rigged to grind everyone down to zero sooner or later: To my grandfather, postwar, it seemed a ham-fisted synopsis of the world as he had come to understand it.