“I’d like to begin with a very simple, very heartfelt prayer,” he said. “Thank God the air-conditioning is working again.”
This prayer appeared to have been offered in earnest. It received a number of amens. Nine in the morning, it was already eighty-three degrees outside. My grandfather himself was an oenophile of air-conditioning and had already given top marks to the Beth Isaac vintage. From a wide grille on the back wall of the sanctuary, a cold blast blew down on his head, and maybe that had something to do with the fact that he did not attend so much as outlast the following service, preserved cryogenically by the air-conditioning until his tedium could be cured. He thought about the young physicist, with his appealing irreverence, and the recording secretary’s soft plump hand patting the empty place beside her. No sense of connection to his past, to the past of his ancestors, or to the scattering of congregants in the pews around him. They might have been strangers in a bus station, solo travelers bound for all points. They might have been separate parties at a pancake house, awash in the syrup emerging from a Wurlitzer organ, played by an old Jew with a Shinola-black pompadour, dressed in a curious tan coverall or jumpsuit and platform saddle shoes. As with pantyhose, though my grandfather had been aware for some time that Reform temples employed organists, this was his first direct experience of the phenomenon. He had always believed that the only real satisfaction offered by the experience of attending synagogue lay in the knowledge that church would be even worse. The presence and sound of the organ, he felt, went a long way to erasing that advantage.
When at last his moment came, he rose and stood, the only mourner at his end of the room, a solitary tower imprisoning an anonymous sorrow. First he wished for a Redeemer whose arrival he did not expect and a redemption he knew to be impossible. Then he told God all the nice things God seemed to need to hear about Himself. Finally, he wished for peace as it was conventionally understood, which he supposed was unobjectionable if no more likely than the coming of a messiah. At any rate, as Uncle Ray once explained to him, if you examined the language, the concluding lines of the kaddish might have been interpreted as a wish that God and everyone else would just, for once, leave the speaker and all his fellow Jews alone.
Rabbi Lance in turn wished that my grandfather and all the other mourning Jews around the world find comfort, and he gestured for people to sit down. My grandfather sat. It seemed to take a long time for his ass to hit the wooden pew again, and even when it did, the rest of him seemed to keep on going down, down.
Over the course of the past year he had trusted, in the absence of evidence, that in time, if he stuck to the formula prescribed by the kaddish, it would work in this instance as it had when his parents died, his mother shortly after his father. Since my grandmother’s death, in the most hardened bunker buried deepest under the Cheyenne Mountain of his heart, he had clung, as though it were a nuclear briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, to a contingency plan: Sooner or later, when he was ready, a woman was going to come along and fuck him. When that happened, he would know that he had begun to recover at last. But sitting in his pew at the back of Beth Isaac, with the organ sounding like the incidental music of an old radio soap opera and the final set of platitudes and baseless claims washing over him, he was obliged to confront the possibility that he might never recover from the loss of my grandmother. Her death had left everything, not just the bed, half empty. A Sandra Gladfelter with her undoubted charms and her clean L’Air du Temps smell of carnations would only ever make the hole seem larger, like a human figure placed alongside a Titan rocket in a diagram to give a sense of the rocket’s scale.
“Hi, there.”
It was the organist, the little old man with the jumpsuit and the shoe-polish hair. A homosexual, my grandfather supposed. He looked around and was surprised to discover that in spite of the impatience verging on rage that had compelled him to leave Beth IHOP, he appeared to be the only person left sitting in the pews. He had no idea how long it had been since the service concluded.
“I just wanted to see if you were all right.”
“I’m fine.”
For the second time that morning, somebody handed him a tissue. My grandfather wiped his eyes.
“You don’t want to go to the oneg?” the organist said. “You don’t want to eat a little something?”
My grandfather shook his head.
“I noticed you stood for the kaddish,” the organist said.
“My wife died last year.”
“Cancer?”
“Yeah.”
“Hey, that’s too bad, sweetheart, I’m sorry. She was sick a long time?”
“The first diagnosis was, I guess it was 1968. They operated, you know, they did radiation. It went into remission, but then it came back.”
“I had it, too,” said the organist. “Cancer. Radiation. Believe you me, sweetheart, it’s no fun.”
“I believe you,” my grandfather said.
“I’m going to the oneg now, all right?”
“Sure. Nice to meet you.”
“You’re all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t want to have a piece of cake?”
“No, thanks.”
The old man patted my grandfather on the shoulder and walked out of the sanctuary. He moved with grace and remarkable dignity, given the platform shoes. My grandfather looked at his watch. He had volunteered to give a demonstration of model building in the Atlantis Beach Lodge’s exhibition room that afternoon, and it was time to be getting back. He sat for a minute longer. He was maybe a little bit tired. He was tired of lawyers and their posturings and of the brutal politesse of taxmen. He was tired of shouldering the weight of other people’s bad decisions along with his own. Most of all he was tired of mourning my grandmother. Even after intermittent full-blown madness had subsided to chronic nervousness and the limitless insecurity common to actors, she had been an exhausting woman to love. But he had loved her no less passionately for the hard work. If there were times when the weight of the secret she carried, whatever it had been, made it impossible for her to love herself and thus to return his love, the fierceness with which she had clung to him even at those moments was recompense enough. It had fed his various hungers. Now there was only the daily scutwork of missing her. He wanted to rest. He wanted, like all the mourners of Zion, to be left in peace.
The car had sat for two hours in the hot sun. It stank of scorched coffee. He leaned in to grab the cup. As he turned back toward the building to look for a waste bin, he stepped on something round that gave under his heel. His foot shot out in front of him and he sat down hard on the asphalt. He dropped the cup and the lid popped off. The remnant inch of coffee dispersed itself efficiently, spattering his shirtfront, necktie, and pants. That night he would find a brown stain on his right sock.