Naked Came the Stranger

JOSHUA TURNBULL

It was too simple, too easy. Ernie Miklos… Morton Earbrow… Gillian, weary of automatic conquests, was tempted to abandon her plan. What was needed at this juncture was a challenge. Something that would permit her to test her mettle.

Joshua Turnbull, spiritual leader of the tiny Jewish community in King's Neck, had in recent months become a figure of modest controversy. It began when he announced plans to amplify a Friday night service the following month with a rock 'n' roll group known as "Jonah and the Wails." It was this announcement that qualified the rabbi for a guest appearance on the Billy & Gilly Show. And the rabbi's public relations man had said Rabbi Turnbull would be delighted to come.

So it was that William Blake – philanderer, cuckold and moderator – looked on naïvely that Monday morning as Gillian hoisted sail. Rabbi Turnbull was difficult from the outset. Not only was he oblivious to Gillian's charm, he even seemed unaware of her presence, and he directed his conversation to the radio audience. He wasn't responding properly to her sallies. He answered them obliquely and continued following a course of his own charting. Gillian added canvas, sailed recklessly after him.

Turnbull, a product of Union Theological Seminary in Cleveland, was a beefy, thick-muscled man in his mid-thirties who sported an ash-blond Vandyke, jaunty salt-and-pepper tweeds and no yarmulke. William noted a resemblance to Skitch Henderson. Rabbi Turnbull sprang from a family of Reform rabbis that had emigrated to the Midwest from Germany before the Civil War. Rabbi Turnbull was considerably more than reformed; he was reconstructed. American to a fault, he was the residual of four generations of reformed Jewry that had refined the stiff-necked, insulated, and anachronistic worship of a desert God into a white precipitate of acceptability and consensus that bordered on the Episcopalian.

Rabbi Turnbull's Sunday School, for example, happened on Sundays. The rabbi had constructed a Temple of steel and glass that was the envy of all the other faiths in King's Neck. (He sometimes took delighted malice in the Greek epigram: "The crucified martyr made light of his loss/ Till he spotted another on a higher cross.") The Temple was built with three prongs jutting skyward, symbolizing the Hebrew letter "shin," a symbol that burst with significance in Jewish lore but was also a symbol that could represent any trinity that one cared to apply. Detractors said it looked like Neptune's trident thrust through the earth, and they claimed it would not be surprising if a huge pagan fist reached up from the waters of Long Island Sound to reclaim it. Vandals from the city had once desecrated the building by painting the words, "By you, this is a shule?" across the front doors.

But the most unpleasant incident connected with the Temple occurred during the dedication ceremonies. Rabbi Turnbull had arranged to liberate a hundred balloons and, as the balloons soared aloft, the string on one of them became entangled on the forked tongue of the Temple's left prong and bobbed there insistently. In effect, the letter "shin" was dotted on the left which, unfortunately, turned it into the letter "sin." And to the rabbi's anguish the balloon remained there for half a day until one of his congregation shot it down with an air rifle.

Despite its beginnings, the Temple prospered. As did Rabbi Turnbull. Gaining some small fame as an ecumenical bridge, the Temple primarily served as the social locus of the Jewish community of King's Neck. The Jews of King's Neck, thoroughly assimilated and distributed, were members of that ultimate ghetto – the dispersed one.

Turnbull always observed that tolerance breeds selectivity. If a community bends over backward to be publicly liberal, it can give itself the bonus of private snobbery. In such a hotbed of tolerance it was perhaps inevitable that the rabbi and his Temple would flourish. Only last year, Turnbull, the father of three, had been named one of the ten most outstanding young rabbis in America. This was followed by a genuine heaven-sent gift – the King's Neck (Reform) Temple Beth Manasseh received a three-page color spread in a Life Magazine series entitled "The New Look in Religion." Shortly thereafter, Rabbi Turnbull received a CORE citation for his Civil Rights efforts. He had marched in Washington and St. Augustine, and his picture had been flashed across the nation when an Associated Press photographer spotted him attempting to reason with an outraged redneck in Selma. Turnbull circulated five hundred of these photographs to leading church, state and community officials at his own expense.

But Rabbi Turnbull's latest venture, hiring Jonah and the Wails for his Friday night service, had caused a stir even among his fellow reformers, most of whom objected on aesthetic rather than ethical grounds. The rabbi dismissed this as so many sour grapes. He had simply stolen a march on them again.

The controversy spread throughout Long Island, with the community about evenly divided. A Newsday poll revealed that the division was among those who thought the rabbi was a charlatan (5 per cent), those who thought he was sincere (5 per cent), those who thought Jonah and the Wails were sincere (20 per cent) and the rest who had not yet formed an opinion. In the face of criticism, Rabbi Turnbull stoutly maintained that Judaism was an organic faith which must adapt or die, "I am improvising on the keyboard of faith," he told Gillian, or rather, the microphone. At that moment Gillian decided, if the rabbi planned to champion reform, she would fight the battle of tradition.

Rabbi Turnbull noted that music had been malleable and contemporary in Jewish culture from the time of King David's harp; as evidence he named such composers as Arabanels in Spain and others such as Mendelssohn and Halévy. Gillian countered by observing that no one on the list composed ritual music. Rabbi Turnbull recalled that even the pious Hasidic rabbis had composed a march of welcome when Napoleon entered Galicia.

"Yes," Gillian said, "but surely you will recall that they scrupulously refrained from using that march in their liturgy. And certainly you're not going to compare the Hasids to… Jonah and the Wails?"

The rabbi turned red around the neck but went on ignoring Gillian. He pointed out that, if the tradition were literally adhered to, the great commentaries on the Bible, the Mishnah and Gmorrah, would never have been written, and the Jews would still be mired in pre-Herodian ritual. What were the commentaries, he asked, but a restatement of the Bible in contemporary terms? He likened the Bible to a Rorschach ink blot and the commentaries to the thought associations of generations of rabbis.

"Careful, rabbi," Gillian said.

"And what is the Reform movement," he continued, "but a restatement of Judaism in contemporary terms? And, consequently, in the direct tradition of the great rabbis. Like your own earlier Christian Reformation, it is an attempt to breathe new life into an ancient faith.

And if we are to rephrase the religious idiom, would it not be a breach of faith to stop short at the music?" Gillian had majored in Far-Eastern Religion at Bard College – that was before she left school and lived off-campus with Charlie, a blind jazz pianist – and she was not so easily put off.

William turned away and sighed. He knew what was going to happen. Whenever a male guest showed a flourish of intellectual vigor, Gillian would first attempt to match erudition – this through an instinctive ability to marshal the right quote, cite the differential case and, at times, invent the properly unnerving statistic. And if she didn't win in this manner, she would resort to banter, ruse and twittering. Then, if the guest genuinely knew what he was talking about, Gillian would ever so deftly suggest that he was a wee bit pompous, lacked humor, took himself more seriously than was absolutely warranted. And, in extreme cases, when the guest was preparing to lash back, Gillian would simply cut him down with a fusillade of charm. Which would it be this time?

"But isn't it true," she began the assault, "that medieval rabbis had interpreted the Law within the traditions of ritual – which you are clearly not doing? And isn't that ritual which you are forsaking essential to judaism, not necessarily for its own sake as you imply, but because it reaffirms the holiness of each human act?"

"My dear lady…."

"Just let me finish, rabbi," she interrupted him. "As for the analogy between Jewish and Christian reformations, I'm more than a little surprised that you would overlook such a basic matter as intent. The original spirit of the Protestant Reformation was to purify, to return to the past, whereas the Jewish Reform sought to streamline and move toward the future. And finally, it will seem strange to some of our listeners that a man of God would allow what is most crude and frivolous in our society into the sacred halls of a temple – not as penitents, but as preachers."

"Is there a question in all that?" For the first time Rabbi Turnbull took note of the opposition.

"Take your choice," Gillian said.

"It was Rabbi Meir," Turnbull said, "who was once asked why he remained friends with an outcast. His reply should serve me as well: 'I found a pomegranate; I ate its contents and threw away its husk.' "

William was getting nervous. Not only did he question the relevance of pomegranates, he could almost hear the radios being turned off. (That talky kike is worse than my gabby wife, he thought.) He was aware that he had become less than peripheral once again. He had vanished, vanished like a rabbit through the magic of others being unaware of his presence. The one thing he was certain of, the conversation was becoming too damned metaphysical for a chatty morning radio show. Who did she think was listening, Reinhold Niebuhr?

That crack about Protestants purifying the church, that was going to go over big with the Catholics.

"Gilly," he interrupted, "darling, don't you think that what the rabbi is trying to say is that religious music can benefit from new sounds, even rock and roll?"

"Not exactly, Billy," she said – control, control – sweetheart, I think the rabbi is saying much more than that. I think he is suggesting a religious structure that is not so much opposed to tradition as outside it. Isn't that so, Rabbi Turnbull?"

They were off once again, Gillian leading Turnbull a merry chase through the forest of tradition and reformation. The rabbi was dazzled by Gillian's fund of knowledge, dazzled but not cowed, and he took to the game with relish. But when he cited an arcane Babylonian scholar, Gillian managed to recall what the sage's equally arcane nemesis had said to refute the argument. Turnbull was fascinated. Up until that moment it had been a game. Suddenly it was a contest. In the next fifteen minutes, Rabbi Turnbull had invoked the sum of his learning at Union Theological and beyond. Gillian had, by this time, changed her tactics, shifted to intellectual guerrilla warfare, sniping, hitting available targets, retreating, twitting and teasing. When the show finally ended, Gillian reflected the infuriating impression that she had won. The issue of Jonah and the Wails had somehow been put in camphor.

"You are an army of scholars, Mrs. Blake," the rabbi conceded. "We must continue this some other time."

"I'd love to, rabbi."

The rabbi nodded absently at William and left. He had hardly closed the studio door. "What the hell did you think you were talking about?" William was asking. "Where did you think you were, one of your Radcliffe seminars?"

"Bard," she corrected him. "And kindly be quiet for a moment, and do some thinking. It doesn't matter what I say. We could be talking Urdu – all that matters is that all those little housewives think I come out on top. In case you've missed the point, that's what this show is all about."

"Try talking Urdu a few times," he said. "And see what happens."

The following day Rabbi Turnbull phoned Gillian and asked for some program tapes. She said she would have them the next evening if the rabbi wouldn't mind stopping over at the house for them. He said no, he wouldn't mind. She said fine.

Gillian had figured right; Wednesday had become Phyllis night. When Rabbi Turnbull arrived at the Blake home, Gillian greeted him in a low-cut dress which covered her midsection and not much else. She had completed the costume with hooped earrings and matching silver bracelets.

"Rabbi, how good of you to come," she said. "I didn't hear you drive up."

"I parked up the block," he said. "I was afraid I might clutter your driveway."

Was it possible? Was it possible that even the rabbi would be so willing?

"But that's what the driveway is for, rabbi," Gillian said. She led him by the hand into the living room. The decor was Spanish – everything low and wide except the mortgage.

"From the outside," the rabbi said, "I expected to be greeted by Henry VII."

"Imitation Tudor," she said. "And I hate imitation anything. William always says that all this castle needs is Anne Boleyn – but I guess I'll just have to do."

"She ended badly," Turnbull observed.

"But she lived so well."

"May I ask," he went on, "where Mr. Blake is tonight?"

"William is working late tonight," Gillian said. "He works late on Wednesdays and on Mondays and sometimes on Sundays. And on those occasions, he leaves me with his dog. Rolf. I don't like dogs, however, and I especially dislike Rolf."

"Where is Rolf?"

"I've locked him in the garage," she said. "I always lock him in the garage when William's gone."

"But isn't that cruel?"

"Not at all," she said. "He's supposed to be a watchdog. He watches over our broken lawn mower."

Gillian offered Turnbull a drink. His rapid acceptance of the offer amused her.

"What's the blessing on a martini, rabbi?"

"It depends on how well you make it, Mrs. Blake." Gillian returned to join Turnbull on the couch. The conversation went from the tapes to the show and then, with increasing animation, to the age-old struggle between good and evil. Turnbull mentioned that evil was known everywhere, even in the rabbinate. He concluded that even the sages – no, especially the sages – were not free from temptation.

"Why the sages especially?"

"There is a saying, Mrs. Blake," he said. " 'The greater the man, the greater the inclination toward evil.' "

With this Turnbull snorted, as if to clear his nostrils, and reached out to grasp Gillian's wrist. She twisted her arm from his grasp, went into the dining room and returned a moment later.

"Here are the tapes, rabbi," she said. "I believe these were what you came for."

"I mistook you, Mrs. Blake." Turnbull rose and strode over to her. "l hope I didn't upset you."

"No," she said.

"I hope we can still be friends."

"I understand, Rabbi Turnbull, that you're married and that you have three children."

"Yes."

"And your marriage is considered a model for the community?"

"Models are for show windows," he said.

"Then you are unhappily married?"

"That is a redundancy, Mrs. Blake."

"Have you been unfaithful before?"

"Why all this?" he asked. "Is this another taped interview?"

"Before you buy the goods, rabbi, you want to know the quality."

"I will talk straight with you," he said. "I have a need for variety which my wife, dear woman, cannot fulfill. I am not a believer in abstinence."

"But isn't abstinence the sign of a holy man?"

"Only according to your saints, Paul and Augustine, both profligates of the worst order trying to repent for their own sins. Abstinence and profligacy are two sides of the same coin. To be obsessed by one, you must be fascinated by the other."

"This is beginning to sound like an interview, rabbi," she said.

"Let us return to the goods, Mrs. Blake. Have we made a sale?"

"Call me Gillian," she said.

"I take it then" – reaching for her – "that the goods are in hand."

"Not until you get your hands on them."

Gillian laughed, slipped away, behind the couch, into the master bedroom. Snorting, the rabbi gave chase. His beard was bobbing. He cornered her in the bedroom against a low Spanish bedpost and pushed her toward the bed.

"Wait," she said, "I must ask you something."

"Honey," he said, "we have talked enough."

"But do you really believe that you'll be damned in hell for this, for what you're trying to do?"

Turnbull studied her for a long moment. Was she joking, crazy? What then? " 'There is neither judgment nor judge' – Rabbi Elisha." With that he thrust Gillian back onto the bed and made a flying leap with the clear intent of pinning her down to stay. But she swerved to one side and the holy man, stiff with lust, came down standard-first on the bedpost. For a full two minutes he did not rise; he lay there, crumpled up, hissing incoherently.

"Rabbi Turnbull, are you all right?"

"Never mind me," he hissed. "Think of Rabbi Elisha." Gillian was solicitous. The poor man was in obvious pain and she searched for ways to comfort him. "Would you like a massage?" she asked. The mere suggestion caused Turnbull to swoon into a comatose state. A half hour passed before his moribund powers were restored.

And no sooner had feeling returned to the affected parts than he once again reached out for Gillian.

"Your clothes," he gasped. "Take off your clothes."

She laughed, pulled away, teased. That crazy shiksa, she wants me to work. In this condition, she wants me to work. He managed to rip off her dress. The sight of her long, faintly tanned legs below black net panties set off new explosions of lust in his belly. Avoiding the bedpost, he pounced again. Gillian tried to kick loose, but he had her pinned this time and was covering her mouth with wet kisses. Then, holding her fast, he began working his way down. He traced her navel with his tongue and reached for her smooth, high, arched buttocks when the phone on the night table began ringing.

"Don't answer it," he whispered.

"Why are you whispering?" she said.

The phone kept ringing, insisting, a noisy witness to an act rendered suddenly ludicrous.

"Forget about it," the rabbi said. "Forget about that f*cking phone."

"Rabbi!" The shock in her voice caused him to loosen his hold. "I can't forget it, it's probably William. If I don't answer, he'll be suspicious."

Turnbull groaned, relaxed. She rolled away from him and picked up the phone.

"Hello. Yes, everything's fine. Why?"

"William?" the rabbi whispered.

No, she indicated. Turnbull clapped his hand over his eyes, groaned aloud. Gillian continued to chat aimlessly for fifteen minutes despite his imploring hand signals. It seemed to be the smallest talk possible. From time to time he reached out to touch her, but she brushed him away. By the end of the call, he was doubled over on the bed again, muttering incoherently. As the thought of strangling her with the phone cord came to him, Gillian calmly hung up.

"Why didn't you hang up right away?" he asked.

"Am I answering to you already, rabbi?"

"Joshua," he said, "call me Joshua."

"Well, Joshua, that happened to be Mario Vella."

"The gangster fellow?"

"The same," she said. "I don't understand why he calls me, but sometimes he says he just wants to talk. And I don't think it would be particularly wise to hang up on him."

"But Mrs. Blake, Gillian, when a man and a woman are in bed…."

"…The world doesn't end," she finished it.

Turnbull looked at her for a moment. She was kneeling opposite him on the bed. He unhooked her brassiere, and this time Gillian offered no resistance. He removed it and bit softly at her breasts. They waved at him, pennants in the wind of lust, and he bit deeply into the acid of her dugs. Then he pulled off the black net panties – there was a cellophane sound as they were peeled past her thighs. They stuck at her knees. What he had hoped (and prayed, even) would be a smooth operation was spoiled as he had to fumble about her knees and she arched to let him finish slipping them off. Turnbull rose from the bed and then, clad only in his beard, rejoined her. He watched with the patience of the sages as Gillian removed the earrings and the bracelet.

Turnbull delayed it, made it last, stared at the naked woman waiting on the sheets for him. Then, as if making an elaborate bow, he took hold of her and pressed hard against her slightly parted legs. He sewed her body with a thread of bites and kisses, dwelling on the tight high pack of her working hips and patching them with little pink squares. Finally he rose up over her, shadowed her with the majesty of his manhood, noticed that her legs were still closed.

"Not yet, Joshua," she said. "Not yet. Kiss my knees first."

"Your knees?"

"My knees."

"Would you prefer the caps or the hollows?"

"Just kiss them, Joshua."

One nut-girl in this town, he thought, one lovely shiksa nut-girl and I had to pick her. Turnbull bent uncomplaining to his new labors. Gillian's knees were well fleshed and dimpled and certainly not unattractive, if one happened to be a kneeman. For ten long minutes he improvised on the knee theme – it wasn't his specialty, but he was always flexible in such matters – and he was rewarded by the sounds of irregular breathing and little growls. He felt her knees starting to part and he rose, but she stiff-armed him neatly.

"More," she cried out.

Oy, oy, oy. Trying to preserve his patience, the rabbi returned to the knees. The growls deepened. It sounded to Turnbull almost animal-like and, in some uncanny way, as though the noise was coming from behind him. A moment later, in horror, he realized it was coming from behind him. It was Rolf. The dog. The dog who had somehow escaped from the garage, from the lawn mower, and now he stood in the bedroom doorway growling at what must have been an incomprehensible sight.

During the instant of recognition, Turnbull, buttocks exposed, knelt frozen in terror. And that one instant was all he had. Rolf leaped. Turnbull felt a searing pain flash through his right hip. Then a clamped set of needles dug into his rump and held fast. Gillian at first felt the rabbi had been transported into a state of exultation that beggared her past experience, and it was only his wild bellowing that made her realize there was an intruder. She crawled around Turnbull, pulled Rolf by an ear and smacked him.

"Naughty dog!" she said, slapping him repeatedly. The beating did no more than cause Rolf to seek an even tighter grip on Turnbull's rump. Finally, tugging at both ears, Gillian managed to pry him from his prey. It must be said to the dog's credit that he did not loosen his grip. It was simply that a portion of the rabbi came free with the dog. Turnbull collapsed on his stomach, moaning, holding his wounds.

"Naughty, naughty dog," Gillian continued. "Now drop that."

Rolf refused to discard his small prize, and Gillian led him to the garage and once again locked him in. Turnbull had not moved.

"I'll get rabies," he moaned.

"Rolf's had all the shots," she assured him. "And it's not all that terrible. William's been after me to throw out this bedspread for an awfully long time."

She found bandages in the bathroom medicine chest, returned and patched Turnbull up.

"You mustn't worry about Rolf," she said again. "He may seem a little testy, but he's certainly not insane. There, that should be better. Well, what did you have in mind next?"

Gillian was sitting cross-legged on the bed before him. The view was too much, even for a newly wounded man. He reached out for one of those magnificent legs, then the other, and he propped himself up on them. Her thighs, he noticed, were springy and firm, the haunches of a lioness. He embraced her in a clumsy bear hug, pushed her heavily down on the bed. He was through with the game playing. He grabbed at her moving thighs and kneaded her swift buttocks. He bit her neck, then her shoulders and pressed himself down on her. Her lips were open in a small smile. Her eyes were closed. The sweat of her body made him weak with desire. Her legs were parted in a wide welcoming arc. The moment had come. Turnbull mounted over the throbbing, waiting woman.

The doorbell rang.

"My God, what's that? What now?"

"Oh, drat," she said. "It must be the girls from the bridge club. I wasn't expecting them until nine."

"Bridge club?"

"I just joined last week," she said. "They meet Wednesday nights."

"Don't answer the door," he pleaded. "Tell them you weren't home."

"The lights are on," she said. "The car is in the driveway. My, wasn't it fortunate you didn't park your car in the driveway. We can be thankful for that."

The bell rang again and Turnbull rolled off.

"Mrs. Blake," he said, "if you knew you were going to have company, why this?"

"It might have worked out," she said. "You'll have to admit, Joshua, you did fumble a bit."

Another ring.

"Joshua, you really have to leave."

"How am I going to get out of here?"

Gillian quickly charted the escape route. Down the stairs, into the den, through the plate glass windows, onto the patio and out the driveway. She would entertain the ladies in the dining room while he made his escape. Even as she was explaining his retreat, Gillian straightened the bedclothes with quick precise movements. Then she climbed into a long, modest frock and, without once looking back at her aspirant lover, left the room.

Turnbull, eyes glazed, sat on the bed until the door clicked shut. Then, still in a weakened condition, he managed to pull himself together. He scrambled into his clothes and, carrying the bloodstained bedspread under his arm, managed to creep out the back way. Despite a narrow escape from a swimming pool waiting for him in the night, the rabbi managed to find the driveway, then the road, then his car. Seated painfully in the safety of his automobile, the rabbi began to consider the entire evening. Was it possible? Was it possible a woman could plan something like that? The invitation, the ferocious dog, the bridge club, even the moans – was it possible that this had been staged for his benefit? Yes, he decided, it was possible.

The following week, Gillian received two phone calls from the rabbi. She was noncommittal, evasive. The next four phone calls she was politely unavailable. The following week – and by this time he heard rumors that Gillian Blake had been seen at a drive-in hamburger stand with Mario Vella, a common gangster – Rabbi Turnbull began sending her presents. The gifts were returned, unopened, to his office beside the Temple.

The more she rejected him, the more he craved her. For just the chance to kiss her knees. He decided that even the dog, Rolf, was not too bad, quite probably a very effective watchdog.

And then he began to hate her.

Love and hate, mingled as they often are in the same current, coursed through his veins and pounded at his temples. Turnbull could not control the demons. And when Gillian began to hang up the phone at the first sound of his voice, he knew the demons would claim him.

He snapped at the members of the ladies' auxiliary. At Temple meetings he seemed distracted and morose, then engaged some of the most important donors in senseless argument. He arrived drunk at Friday night service. Saturday he was seen at a roadhouse with a notorious woman. Acquaintances sought him out to talk to him, but he would have none of it.

In a way, a strange way, Turnbull became more popular in the community than he had ever been. Scandal is a community service and a free entertainment at that; witnesses generally feel obliged to pay admission with sympathy. Turnbull scorned their sympathy, slapped his wife, shouted at his children and, just before the scheduled appearance of Jonah and the Wails, disappeared for three days.

Cooler heads in the Temple said that this was all for the better, and no police report was issued. Rabbi Lerman, Turnbull's inarticulate assistant, was given specific instructions to get the services over with as quickly as possible.

The services that Friday night were expectably well attended. Reporters and photographers fattened the congregation considerably, and the first half of the proceedings went smoothly. Jonah and the Wails, four grave young men dressed neatly in Mod black, made a fairly conservative entrance if one could overlook the blond wigs. They wore wide leather ties with leaping sperm whales spraying toward the knots. They made their music with two electric guitars, a tambourine and a whale's jawbone that was banged against a single kettle drum. The second half of the service began with the Torah removed from the holy ark and Jonah leading the group in song -

Open the doors

Git out the book

Uh-Uh-uh-uh-uh

And take a look.

We all prayin'

(Yeah,yeah,yeah)

We all prayin'…

It was an instantaneous success, and some in the audience saw a twinge of irony in the fact that Rabbi Joshua Turnbull could not be there to savor his most hard-fought victory. The second song, "Kneelin' and Feelin' and Prayin' and Sayin'," was launched in splendid fashion, with flash bulbs providing punctuation, when the spectre appeared.

Rabbi Turnbull, mantled in a potato sack, his eyes red and wild, marched upon Jonah and the Wails, commanded them to stop. They did. Turnbull mounted the lectern and, foaming with rage, denounced Jonah as a false prophet. He turned to his horrified board of directors and accused them of the sin of the biblical Jonah, ignoring the will of God.

"We are in mortal peril!" he shouted.

Turnbull, holding onto the lectern like a forecastle, felled three Temple vice presidents and was holding his own with a fourth when the police arrived.

"Philistines," he cried, "I'll take the jawbone from this ass and lay your thousand low."

Jonah gave up his bone and fled into the crowd. Turnbull, discovering that it was rubber, threw it at the last of the retreating Wails. Finally, hemmed in by superior forces, Turnbull was overpowered and carted off. The remainder of the service was canceled. And, though the Temple did not press charges against its rabbi, he disappeared forever from King's Neck.

It was rumored in later years that he had changed his name to Brodsky and had found employment as a beadle in a deteriorating Orthodox synagogue in East New York, where he remained, penitent, recluse, who flagellated himself ritualistically. But that was only a rumor, of course.