The Brazen Image

by J. Leland Kupferberg

Yisgadal v’yiskadash sh’may roboh…Amen. The words rolled off Sid Granot’s tongue as casually - and as thoughtlessly - as if he were ordering a tongue sandwich at the 2nd Avenue Deli. However, this was the 2nd Avenue Kielcer Congregation, and Sid found himself standing amid his fellow congregants, intoning the traditional Mourner’s Kaddish in memory of a dead father who had passed away eight months previously in the midst of ordering a tongue sandwich at the 2nd Avenue Deli.

In accordance with Jewish custom, coupled with a pre-mortem plea from Sid’s father, Sid was to attend synagogue every day for up to one year following his father’s death, intoning the ancient Aramaic prayer three times daily - morning, afternoon, and evening. The rationale, as Sid understood it, was that once a parent passed on, it was the son’s duty to ensure that the parent secured a treasured slot in heaven - primarily by intoning the Mourner’s Kaddish, thrice daily, for up to a year. The problem, as Sid’s father had mapped it out, was that nobody actually knew the criteria for gaining admission, so the Kaddish, at the end of play, was thrown in - like bonus points in a cosmic pinball game. “I don’t ask for much, Sidalah,” his father had asked, “but give me a good reference when I’m gone.”

Sid had figured he could rotate mourning shifts with his brother Marty, but Marty was an atheist, and couldn’t be guilted into sacrificing his sleep-ins. So, at the age of 45, afflicted by arthritis, angina, and a soul-deadening career in insurance, Sid took upon himself the full burden of pleading for his father’s chances in the next life. “You can’t do this three times a day,” his wife Shirley had implored him. “It will kill you!”

On Shirley’s advice, he had gone to see Rabbi Itzkowitz, who assured him that twice a day was sufficient enough to score the requisite credits. For the first four months, it all went without a hitch. Attending services at the Conservative synagogue, Beth Tzedaka, with Rabbi Itzkowitz presiding, they were just able to muster the required prayer quorum of ten adult Jewish males, all of whom were likewise there to plead for their dead fathers’ souls. It all went awry, however, when Abe Crandall passed on - felled by angina - cutting down their numbers to nine. “That sonovabitch Crandall!” Morris Shapiro wailed. “I’ve already put ten months, two weeks, and three days into this! And now I’ll lose all my credits!”

But fate intervened when Rabbi Itzkowitz discovered that the Navajo janitor’s maternal grandmother was in fact Jewish, thereby rendering him, according to Jewish law, a bonafide member of the tribe. Thus, upon corralling in this newly christened “lost” Israelite, the quorum was restored to full strength. Nobody seemed to be bothered by the fact that their Navajo kinsman tended to hold his prayer book upside down and couldn’t tell a Hebrew letter from a Chinese pictogram. They got their credits all the same.

By the fifth month, Sid Granot had started to get religion, or at least the need for religion. Shirley figured he had OD’ed on too much daily supplication. “God willing,” she told her friends, “he’ll grow out of it once he’s done his twelve months.” But he didn’t grow out of it. One day in synagogue, while leafing through a bible, he looked up and noticed a pair of ornately engraved brass lions adorning the Holy Ark at the east end of the sanctuary.

“Tell me, Rabbi Itzkowitz, aren’t we prohibited from making any graven images?”

“Why, yes.”

“So aren’t those lions up there graven images?”

“Why, no.”

“Why not?”

“Because we’ve always had lions up there.”

“But the book says…”

“Book, shmook. Do we pray to these lions? Do we bow down and say, ‘O Mighty Lion, hallowed be thy snout?”

“But it says you can’t make any graven image…”

“Did I make those lions? Do I look like a goldsmith to you? I’m just the rabbi.”

Two days later, Sid permanently took leave of Beth Tzedaka, in the process cutting the quorum back down to nine, and earning the eternal hostility of his former prayer mates. He sampled a few other synagogues, but none was to his liking - too much decorum and not enough warmth - that is, until he came upon the ramshackle Kielcer Congregation in the East Village. Resembling little more than a creaky, turn-of-the-century storefront facade from the outside, inside it bore a dignity and a serenity that hearkened back to simpler times in the Old Country, when cities were actually towns, and everyone seemed to be related. In fact, at the Kielcer Congregation, everyone did seem to be related, what with the gaggle of Goldschlagers, Goldshlags, and Shlaggers - most with roots in the city of Kielce in Poland.

All the same, nobody seemed to take any particular notice of him when he started to show up for the daily prayer quorum. And as the weeks passed, he no longer took notice of the prayers he was now reciting by rote, nor of the dead father who set it all in motion. Instead, Kielcer became his own personal sanctuary, a refuge from a job that drained him, and a wife who fretted daily about the social status she might have attained, if only she had the foresight - and fortitude - to have stuck with the zit-scarred suitor from seventh grade who grew up to become a “world famous” foot doctor.

“You spend all your time at shul getting points for up there. Would it kill you to do a little better down here?” she would repeatedly ask.

“I’m a loving father, a loyal husband. What more do you want?”

“Pffffffftt!” he heard her spit out in exasperation - or was it rather, obscured by the snap of crackling saliva… “foot doctor?”

On the Sabbath, when the main sanctuary overflowed with jubilant congregants, Kielcer served as more than just a refuge for Sid. It became a temple of song. And presiding over it all, chanting the haunting ancestral melodies with a lilting baritone, was the charismatic cantor, Raphael Schlag. At the relatively youthful age of 39, Cantor Schlag, with his well-groomed dark beard and piercing eyes, resembled the handsome father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl - except that the hugely bulbous nose was more evocative of Jimmy Durante.

The cantor was married to a woman who, at 30, was said to resemble a cross between Hedy Lamarr and Molly Picon. As she was away visiting her parents in Israel during the first couple months that Sid was at Kielcer, all he was left to ponder of her was the purported image of this strange hybrid.

Word also had it that the cantor’s wife was seeking out a reputed kabbalist somewhere in Tiberias, in the hope that a mystical incantation or two would prod some fruit into her stubbornly barren womb. However, some surmised, in the event that she came back already laden with fruit, one would wonder who really deserved the credit for all that prodding.

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, 1959:

As the sun beamed in through windows stained by age and corrosion, illuminating the various permutations of Schlags, Schlaggers, et al., Sid sat amid the congregants, lulled into a blissfully catatonic state by the melodious chants that issued forth from Cantor Schlag’s gullet. A day for spiritual cleansing, Sid thought to himself as he stretched in his seat, placing an arm around the bony shoulders of his 14 year-old son, Benny, who was painstakingly probing an emergent beehive of whiteheads on his chin.

Almost absent-mindedly, Benny’s hand reached across the aisle, tugging at the ratty gray curtain that separated the men’s side from the women’s. Sid gently squeezed his son’s shoulder. “Don’t play with the mechitzah,” he admonished him. But Benny continued to tug away at the curtains, slowly widening a thin partition between them, exposing a view onto the other side of the congregation – and the world of women that lay within it. “It’s not nice to look,” Sid admonished him once again.

The curtains, of course, served as a barrier – known as a mechitzah – to guard against just such a contingency. In Orthodox synagogues, such as Kielcer, it was a time-honored practice to separate the men from the women as they congregated for prayer, the explanation being that carnal thoughts would invariably intrude on proper spiritual devotion if the genders were mixed. “Whoever heard of such nonsense?” Shirley had complained to Sid when she learned that she would be spending the New Year sitting alone on the women’s side. “We should suffer because you guys can’t keep your thoughts in your pants?”

“I’m looking for Mum,” Benny lamely explained as he peered through the partition like a tomcat looking through a nudie show peephole.

Sid leaned in toward his son, one eye drawn toward the forbidding partition as he whispered, “Enough with the leering.” Yet as Cantor Schlag’s voice shifted into heavy vibrato mode, providing an erotic musical counterpoint to the vision that lay before him, Sid looked out through the widened slit in the curtains, upon the seated host of the daughters of Israel – young and old, taut and crinkled, frumpy and nubile. And while virtually all were dressed in the de rigueur conservative, almost dowdy, fashion, Sid remained transfixed by the serene, slightly arousing, vision of a community of women engaged in common prayer.

And so, as father and son bonded in a shared act of voyeurism, it was then that Sid focused in on the raven-haired beauty seated only a few feet across from them, yet seemingly occupying a different dimensional plane as framed by the curtains. He scanned her visage in profile, studying her lips as they moved in silent prayer. With large, childlike hazel eyes and a thin aquiline nose, she struck him as a strangely exotic hybrid – a cross between Cyd Charisse and Molly Picon.

“That’s the cantor’s wife,” Hy Goldshlag whispered as he leaned forward in his seat toward Sid’s ear, following his line of vision.

Sid looked back and grimaced, affirming nothing but embarrassment. “She just got back last Wednesday,” Hy continued. “A real sweetie, huh?”

With a dismissive wave of his hand, Sid made out like it was nothing. Facing forward, adopting an exaggerated expression of prayerful devotion while he looked out at Cantor Schlag at the front of the sanctuary, Sid surreptitiously rolled one eyeball back toward the curtain as he continued to leer - albeit peripherally - at the cantor’s wife.

Thus exposed through the mechitzah and captured in the peripheral field of a wandering eyeball, Mrs. Schlag remained unaware of her starring role in this visual feast. She started to sway in tempo to the shifting rhythm of her husband’s chants when, as she shifted in her seat, her prayer book abruptly slipped off her lap and onto the floor.

And then he saw it. The image was blurred yet unmistakable: the cantor’s wife as she leaned forward, bending ever so slightly toward the curtain as she reached down for the book, lower and lower, a button - or two – opened at the top of her blouse, offering a view of a thin dark creek running through peach-tinted canyons. Cleavage. The rods and cones in his leering eyeball tightened as all consciousness flitted away from the other eyeball that looked out lifelessly to Cantor Schlag. Cleavage.

“I think I spotted…” Benny blurted out yet abruptly stopped when Sid swung around and raised his hand in paternal fury. Benny looked on at his father, more puzzled than fearful. “I think I spotted Mum.”

Sid couldn’t sleep that night, beguiled as he was by the image of Mrs. Schlag’s cleavage. Curled up in the fetal position, his back turned to Shirley, he was pondering how to address the sudden needs of a throbbing limb whose use, over the past decade or so, was strictly zoned for bladder release. With only a two hour window left to renew himself before a full day’s work, he attempted to tame the nagging limb by doing actuarial tables in his head. But it wasn’t budging.

Sid turned toward Shirley, who was likewise curled up in the fetal position, facing away from him and snoring like a pachyderm. Here was his wife of eighteen years, the mother of his only child – her bottle blonde hair rolled up tightly in curlers, her wrestler’s figure swaddled loosely in a turquoise terry-cloth bathrobe. They were both virgins when they met on a summer trip to the Catskills. He was 22 and classified as 4F on account of a blister condition. She was 20, svelte, brown-eyed, and demure. After four months of heavy petting, he finally dropped the Big Question, impelled more by the desire to reach third base than to secure a life partner. As for the day of their wedding, all he could recall was the image of himself standing before his intended, struggling to remember the Hebrew benediction as he silently pleaded with an erection that threatened to expose him before family and friends alike – in eager anticipation for his license to score.

The first few years together, it was difficult. But they did learn to navigate the minefield of their respective quirks, and when Benny came along, they finally had a common enterprise to which their energies could be directed: Hebrew school, braces, summer camp, and so on. Where Benny wasn’t available, they finessed over the troubles with large dosages of Bingo, backgammon, and nights with Milton Berle.

And now here he was, after 18 years of wedded co-habitation, plotting to put himself to sleep by porking his Bingo buddy and T.V. partner. No, no, not her! his nagging limb implored. Preserve me for Mrs. Schlag! He rolled over on his back, staring, glassy-eyed, at the ceiling. Tell ya what, the limb throbbed. Stroke me a little and I’ll give you your shut-eye. And so he did.

Night after night, through the succeeding ten days of atonement leading up to the holy day of Yom Kippur, while other men spilled their hearts’ blood in contemplation of their sins, Sid spilled seed in fervent contemplation of another man’s wife.

On the eve of the Day of Atonement, upon conclusion of the Kol Nidrei service, arthritic Morrie Siegel placed his hands firmly on Sid’s shoulders, cracking his knuckles like maracas as he muttered a benediction: “May you be granted a seat in the Book of Life.”

“Schmuck,” his brother Max interjected, “you mean a place in the Book. Seats are in the World-To-Come!”

“Oy, a bruch. With my back? Sitting all the time in the World-To-Come, no thanks!”

To Sid, it was all a distant drone as his eyes desperately scanned the bustling surge of humanity filing out of the sanctuary. Where was she? For the past ten nights, he had feasted on the blurred image of that partially unveiled flesh. Halfway through the week, the contours of her face had begun to fade from memory. Two nights after that, the whole delicate segment had started to fray at the edges, threatening to dissipate its potent hold over him. And now he desperately needed to fill in the blanks, to perform a restoration, to anchor a tattered memory with perhaps a brief glimpse of her face.

“Sid!” Shirley called out from behind, but his ears were switched off to her. “Sid…”

Sid’s hand darted out excitedly as Cantor Schlag shuffled past. “A good yontif to you!”

Cantor Schlag stopped abruptly, pondering a proffered handshake that looked more like a stick-up. “And a good yontif to MISSUS Schlag!” Sid eagerly peered out over the Cantor’s broad shoulders, expecting to sight the telltale Charisse/Picon hybrid.

“She’s home with the flu.”

“Oh.”

Cantor Schlag cleared his throat and took his hand. “Well, a good yontif,” he chanted as he headed for the exit.

As Sabbaths came and went, with no sign at all of Mrs. Schlag, Sid grew desperate. Although his mourning period was long past, he started once more to attend services every weeknight, and then, with no sighting, he began to pop up at the morning sessions. “Not this again,” Shirley bellowed as she clutched her heart. “This will kill you!”

“That’s my business!”

Shirley nodded, a bit contemptuous. “Pffffft! All this investment in an afterlife,” she mused while buttering up her bagel.

It came to him in an epiphany one bleary morning in late November. “Vocal lessons!” he declared over a bowl of cereal.

“That’s crazy,” Shirley retorted.

“Why? He has a beautiful voice.”

“But a cantor? He’s only fourteen.”

“So he’ll train early.”

“He doesn’t want to be a cantor.”

“Sure he does! Ask him.”

She turned to Benny, who was busy nibbling away at a waffle while reading the Sunday funnies. “Benjala, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

“A foot doctor,” he answered indifferently.

Ding dong. Cantor Schlag smiled as he opened the door, greeted by the sight of a shivering adolescent in an unzipped winter jacket. “You’re early, Benny.” He turned to Sid and nodded.

“Do you mind if I watch while he learns?” Sid asked.

“Of course not. Come in.”

As Sid and Benny lazily stamped their feet, Indian-style, on the doormat, shaking off the snow caked on their boots, Sid eagerly scoped the place.

“Is Mrs. Schlag around?” he asked rather meekly.

“She’s napping upstairs, so we’ll have to keep it down a little.”

“Oh,” Sid groaned.

For the next fifty minutes, Sid sat docilely in an armchair in the corner of the living room as his tone-deaf son made a half-hearted attempt at practicing his musical scales: “Doooo – raaayyy – meeeee – faaaaaaa…”

Sid nervously shook his leg, alternately looking at his watch and darting an eyeball up the staircase in a fruitless search for life on the second floor. It was 6:48 PM. Through the window, the dark autumn sky contrasted sharply with the whitening onslaught of snow flurries.

“…sooooo – laaaaaa – teeeeee – dooooo…”

Cantor Schlag glanced at the clock overhead, gently stroking his Herzlean beard with one hand while rubbing his Durante-esque nose with the other.

“…teeeeeeee – laaaaaaa – soooooo – faaaaaaaa…”

Sid tensed up as Cantor Schlag muffled an outgoing yawn with the back of his hand. A nervous eyeball once more shot up toward the desolate second floor, pleading, imploring, begging for any inkling of movement from out of the dark void: Let there be light, dammit! Liiiiiiight!!

“…meeeeee – raaaaaay – doooooooo…”

“Ok, that’s just about right,” Cantor Schlag sleepily proclaimed as he rose from his chair.

Liiiiiiiiiight! Liiiiiight!

Cantor Schlag turned to address Sid. “I was thinking… five nights a week might be a bit much for the boy.”

Sid donated one eyeball to Cantor Schlag while the other one continued to post guard on the second floor. “Don’t worry. Money’s no object.” Liiiiiight! Liiiiiiight!!!

“Ok, well, it might just be a bit much for me. I think it’s best we start out at once a week.”

Liiiiiight!! One more week without a glimpse to stoke the dying embers of his memory. And what was there to replace that image - anonymous images that could be purchased for mere pocket change off a magazine rack? This was Mrs. Schlag’s personal cleavage, so tantalizing in its utter rarity, a once-in-a-lifetime public unveiling. He was not about to let the memory slip away without a battle. “Let’s get Mrs. Schlag’s opinion.”

“She’s sleeping.”

“I’m just curious.”

“About?”

“Her opinion.”

“But she’s sleeping.”

Benny interjected, “Pop, I don’t think I want to be a cantor…”

“Quiet!” Sid erupted. “Can’t you see she’s sleeping!”

“Please, quiet,” Cantor Schlag implored Sid. “She is sleeping.”

“But Pop…”

“Quiet!!”

“Please, Sid. The voice…”

And then…light.

“Is everything alright down there?”

Cantor Schlag looked up toward the brightened landing, stroking his proto-Zionist facial growth. “Yes, I’m here with Sid Granot and his boy.”

And there she was, hovering at the top of the staircase, swaddled in a thick gray housecoat, her raven-black bangs protruding out from under the red-checkered cloth that wrapped around her head – Molly Picon in a farmhouse turban. She looked down upon them and smiled. “So what’s the commotion?”

Sid craned his neck upward, glaring straight into her sleep-puffed eyes, using them as a prompt to retrieve, strand by strand, the blurred fragments of a cherished memory: The mechitzah. The prayer book. Bending down. Cleavage.

“Sid wants your opinion,” the Cantor abruptly broke in, stirring Sid from his ritual reconstruction. He turned slightly toward Cantor Schlag, who seemed to be throwing him a quizzical look. It’s all over. He knows.

Mrs. Schlag reached up to tuck a stray bang back under her checkered head wrap. “What would you like to know, Sid?”

He was gripped with an urge to storm out of there, to leave Kielcer and the Cantor and all of it forever behind him, to tell Shirley how terribly sorry he was. “It’s nothing,” he murmured as he cast his eyes down, feeling the Cantor’s eyes boring into him. He knows. He knows. “I should be going.”

“Did you ask him about the committee, Raphael?”

“I forgot.”

Sid, now preoccupied with the buttons of his winter coat, fastened them up against the ill wind he was sure that was blowing from Cantor Schlag’s direction. Such an idiot I am. An idiot.

Mrs. Schlag reached up to stifle a yawn. “Ask him.”

Still fumbling with the buttons, Sid could feel the Cantor leaning in closer, his nostril breath redolent with the faint scent of dill pickles. Okay, okay, I’m leaving. You’ll never see me again. “My wife wanted me to ask you,” the Cantor started slowly, “if you would like to join the Sunday Morning Sandwich Committee.”

Sid started to cast around for his boots. “Sure, sure. Come on, Benny.”

“Really, it’s to bring more congregants into Rabbi Goldshlag’s weekly Mishna class,” Mrs. Schlag added. “One week, we’ll serve pastrami on rye, another week, it’ll be corned beef, tongue, etcetera.”

“Yes, well, it sounds interesting,” Sid grumbled as he nervously continued to cast about for his footwear, swinging around abruptly as a firm hand came down upon his shoulder. Alright already. I’m going! Cantor Schlag grinned and handed him his boots.

“Basically, we need a few people to handle various activities,” Cantor Schlag went on. “To order the meat, mustard, pop, and pickles. Making the sandwiches, setting out napkins – if you have the time, of course.”

Kneeling down, Sid kept his eyes glued to his boots as he struggled to wedge his toes into them. “Of course, of course,” he answered. He doesn’t know. Or…he knows but he’s pretending he doesn’t.

Sid stood up and frantically gestured to Benny, directing him toward the door. Cantor Schlag smiled as he handed Sid his gloves. A momentary silence settled between them. Damn you, Cantor Schlag. You’ll never catch me again, you sonofabitch.

“We really appreciate this, Sid,” he heard Mrs. Schlag say, yet studiously kept his back to her.

“Hmmph,” Sid indifferently responded. There, you bastard. Look how blase I am toward your wife. Who can possibly have such interest in your wife and yet be so blase? To nail down the point, Sid leaned forward and gave the Cantor an uncomfortably warm embrace. “Thank you so much for the lesson.”

“See you next week,” Mrs. Schlag called out.

“Hmmph,” Sid nodded, and promptly left with Benny in tow.

When they arrived back home, Sid skipped dinner and headed straight to the washroom, claiming indigestion. Safely locked in, he lowered his trousers, and, staring ahead at the peeling lime wallpaper with its rose petal designs, he once more conjured up the fully restored image of Mrs. Schlag: Dropping her book. Picking it up. Dropping her book. Picking it up. Dropping her book…

A week later, when Benny stubbornly refused to continue with his vocal lessons, Sid erupted in a fury, threatening to cut off his television privileges, and when that didn’t work, he made a loud pretense of calling his cousin Barney - the family lawyer – to plan his son’s disinheritance. “Oh, come on,” Shirley laughed. “He’d do far better as a disowned foot doctor than as a cantor living off your piddling estate.”

Three days later, while attending his first Sandwich Committee meeting at the synagogue, he did catch a glimpse of Mrs. Schlag as she briefly poked her head through the door. “Hello, Mrs. Goldshlager, Mrs. Shlagbaum, Mr. Granot.”

“Hmmph,” Sid answered. That sighting was enough to keep him going for another two weeks. He could never figure out why she never attended any services, nor was she much of a presence at Kielcer’s many other organizational activities. Cantor Schlag, by contrast, had a hand in practically every aspect of the synagogue, and Sid used that fact to increase the likelihood of more sightings.

He signed up for the Purim Party Planning Committee, the Tuesday Night Bingo Quorum, even the Goldshlager Genealogical Society, although he wasn’t remotely related, but he finagled his way in as Treasurer, convincing them that they actually needed one. In this way, he could schedule impromptu visits to the Schlag household, delivering bingo chips, financial reports, styrofoam cups. More often than not, Cantor Schlag would be the one to answer the door. But sometimes, when he was lucky, it would be Mrs. Schlag at the door, offering a sighting that would seldom last longer than fifteen seconds, and that would usually end along the lines of, “Thank you, Sid. I’ll tell him you came by with the cups.” Still, despite the brevity of the sightings, they were enough to keep him going, week after week, month after month, always injecting an element of tantalizing palpability into his nightly reconstructions of Mrs. Schlag’s holiday unveiling.

And as he grew closer to Cantor Schlag, living from glimpse to cherished glimpse of the Cantor’s wife, the agonizing forbiddeness of it all – the consummation of desire that could never possibly be - transformed his nights into an orgiastic festival of auto-eroticism: She drops the book. She picks it up. She drops the book. She picks it up…

“Your husband is now a man of the spirit,” Shirley’s friends would assure her, in the vain hope of staving off her mounting depression. Her husband had thrown himself, body and soul, into the world of styrofoam cups, paper plates, and cookie bake-offs, and all she had was the television for companionship. “He’s a great man,” they would counsel her. “Look at all the plaques and certificates on your wall. And one day,” they prophesied, “he may even win a Distinguished Jewish Community Service Award.”

Thirteen days before Passover, 1967:

Cantor Schlag had offhandedly offered to host Sid and Shirley for the first night of their Passover seder meal, subject, of course, to Mrs. Schlag’s approval. Cantor Schlag’s brother was visiting from Israel and, with a brood consisting of seven sons, it really all came down to a question of space. Benny, at 22, was afflicted with his father’s congenital blister condition, rendering him unfit for service in East Asia. Taking a year off before he entered first-year podiatry at CUNY, he decided to go backpacking across Europe with his college roommate, Danny Klein. When Cantor Schlag heard that Sid and Shirley would be holding their first seder without Benny, he insisted that they join him for the festive meal. “We’ll be your family this Passover.”

Sid could barely contain his enthusiasm at the thought of spending an unbroken hour or two in the presence of Mrs. Schlag, where, no doubt, he would have the opportunity to steal as many furtive glances as time – and vantage point – would allow. This, he felt, would be a night to fuel the fantasies of all other nights.

However, fate decreed otherwise when Benny showed up at Sid’s front door less than two weeks before the onset of Passover, attired in torn jeans and a green denim vest, his greasy brown hair styled in a puffy “shag” cut. On his arm was a nubile redhead in a tight-fitting orange mini-skirt, sporting a matching puffy “shag” cut.

And so, as Sid and Shirley sat rigidly on the sofa, they listened attentively as Benny - ensconced on the armchair across from them, the redhead firmly planted on his lap – announced his plans to marry “the yin of my yang.” Although originally known as Sinead McCarthy, a 19 year-old native of Boulder, Colorado, she re-named herself Autumn after failing a correspondence course in Ecology – “Insufficient postage on my mail-in exam,” she offered by way of explanation. Neither of them could figure out whether they had actually met inside a pub in Brussels or outside in a parking lot, as both were somewhat inebriated at the time.

“This will be the mother of your grandchildren,” he proclaimed to his parents while casually fondling her left buttock.

Shirley leaned forward, a look of concern on her face. “Are you Jewish?”

“We’re all children of Gaia, the Earth Mother,” Autumn replied.

Shirley leaned back, dumbly nodding. Sid leaned forward now, his brow furrowed. “You’re not one of those … “free” girls, are you?”

“I reclaimed my virginity last week.”

Sid leaned back and turned to Shirley, who had stiffened up considerably. “That’s alright, we’re modern people,” Shirley offered, more as a self-justifying mantra than as a reflection of fact. “The important thing is,” she stated as she leaned in once more toward Autumn, “will you make my Benjala happy?”

“She will complete me,” Benny assured them as he squeezed her right posterior cheek.

“What about the seder at the Schlag’s?” Sid asked, growing more irritable. “There’ll be no room for them.”

“So we’ll hold our own seder,” Shirley retorted.

“What will I tell Cantor Schlag?”

“Tell him Benny’s back. He’ll understand.”

Sid sat there, gulping down the bile of his frustration. He wanted to strangle Shirley, to bludgeon Benny, and flay his girlfriend. Damn them! Damn them! Bolting up from the sofa, he fumed, “No! We made plans!”

Shirley placed her hand on his elbow. “Calm down. So I’ll give him a call and ask if they can fit in two more.”

Sid pulled away, protesting, “There won’t be enough food!”

“Oh, that’s alright,” Benny volunteered. “We live off a berry-based diet, anyway. We’ll bring our own.”

“How about seats? There won’t be enough seats!”

“We’ll sit on the floor,” Autumn replied. “In the corner.”

He felt trapped, backed into a corner by their oppressive reasonableness. Here was his son, happily in love, eager, even, to share a religious dinner with his parents, and yet all Sid could think of was the impression it would have on the Schlags. Look at them! They’ll embarrass me. He looked out upon his wife, his son, and the redhead planted thereon – all prosecutors in a trial to win his compliance, yet he had no case he could plead before them, none they could understand. You selfish bastard. You selfish, perverse bastard. “You don’t understand,” he pleaded. They waited. Maybe, quite possibly, deep within the murky regions of his mind, there was a good reason – a real reason that any right-thinking, decent person could plead before one’s family, one that surely went far beyond the surface perversion that only seemed to motivate him. Or so he hoped.

And then… “I am against this on principle!” They waited. Yes, he would fight this one out on the sturdy mantel of principle. He just needed a few more seconds to find one. “She is a shiksa!” he elaborated. “A non-Jew!” As he continued, pacing the room, he was convincing himself as much as he hoped he was convincing them. “Think of the centuries – the centuries! – that our people have suffered. Think of the torment our ancestors – your ancestors! – endured to ensure the survival of our heritage. And now” – he pointed a quivering finger at Benny – “it all ends with you!” He allowed for a pregnant moment of silence to distill through the room. It felt right. It had to be the real reason. He was not so modern, so tolerant, as he had always convinced himself. Somewhere inside himself, there was a little Hasidic rabbi, tugging away at his heartstrings, urging, “Stay the course.”

“I’m not a fool,” Sid continued. “I see how you’ve been groping her. A big love? Pfffft! You’re throwing it all away, and for what – nice legs? A short skirt? A pair of heels?” And then the coup de grace: “You know,” he went on, casting out a turgid finger for effect, “there is an ancient Hebrew proverb, shechayan omad, asechol b’tachad: When the prick stands, the brains go up the ass!”

“Are you done?” Benny asked, looking on indifferently.

“Yes,” Sid responded as he took his seat beside his stunned wife.

Benny sighed, gently prodded Autumn off his lap, and wearily lifted himself from the armchair. “I suppose I should be screaming now and telling you where to go. Truth is, I don’t much care. You haven’t lived my life. You’ve been busy being Mr. Synagogue, Mr. Community Saint. But frankly, you’re a crappy father, and if you didn’t already score so many of those community brownie points, I’d tell you where to go. As for me, I’m just bored and empty.” Placing his arms around Autumn’s waist while nibbling away at her earlobe, Benny looked his father hard in the eye. “Do I love this woman in some grand romantic way?” he went on. “Maybe, maybe not. All I know is that every day I spend with her is one less day I want to go into the garage and let the gas run. That might not be much for you to go on, but I’m pretty much done with you, anyway.”

And with that, both Benny and Autumn left, with Shirley frantically tailing after them. Sid wanted to say something, to qualify himself, to lessen the impact of his performance, but he stayed mounted on the sofa. After the seder, he reasoned. I’ll make it all better after the seder. Shirley, however, had no more stomach for it all. “That’s right!” she wailed. “Destroy our lives like a fanatic! You go alone to that seder - and I hope you choke on a piece of gefilte fish!”

However, gefilte fish wasn’t on the menu when, thirteen days later, Mrs. Schlag brought out the first course of the seder meal – a bowl of rock hard, unsalted matzo balls swimming in a watery gray unsalted broth. Seated on either side of Sid – framing him like matching bookends – were Cantor Schlag’s twin 12 year-old Israeli nephews, each bearing a preternaturally bulbous nose – apparently, a Schlag tribal marker - and, seemingly every three seconds, leaning across Sid to engage in what sounded like, to him, standard Middle Eastern gibberish: Haka haka sheem! Haka sheem!

Across from Sid sat Mrs. Schlag’s 80 year-old father, a sad-eyed, well-groomed gentleman with a passive demeanor – an immigrant from Romania who had landed in Palestine with his wife and daughter in 1940, just barely escaping the Nazi moloch that would devour the rest of his family a few years later. Living alone in a dilapidated flat in Haifa since his wife died fours years previously, his only remaining biological connection to this world was his 38 year-old childless daughter, a woman whose exotic, offbeat beauty was somehow deepened by a perpetual red-rimmed wariness around the eyes. Whether it was due to a fatalistic acceptance that the family line would end with her, or instead bespoke of disappointment over paths not taken, only she – and perhaps her husband – would know for sure.

Nor did Sid take any notice of it. To him, she was The Other, the hollowed-out vessel he needed in order to anchor an image that made no demands on him, an image that was immune to disappointment and to the normal laws of decay. Nor could she – as she stooped over his shoulder to serve him a steaming plate of unsalted shoe leather masquerading as brisket – suspect her role as the featured attraction in the fantasy life of an aging insurance salesman.

“Hmmph,” Sid nodded, briefly looking up at her – and stealing a peek - as she placed the plate down before him. Behind them, her six year-old nephew was busy homicidally smiting his four year-old brother with a bag of Israeli chocolates. Haaaaa-kaaaaa-sheeeem!!! Haaaaa-kaaaa-sheeeem!!!

Ha ka! Ha ka sheem! screamed their mother from across the table, a husky, prematurely gray-haired woman with a mottled complexion. Ha ka? Haka haka haka sheem, answered their father – Cantor Schlag’s brother – an easygoing diamond dealer with chunky fingers and a red beard. Haaaaaa-kaaaa-sheeeeeem!! Haaaaaa-kaaaa-sheeem!!

“Enough!!” Mrs. Schlag screamed, placing a quivering hand through her still-dark hair, coaxing the room into a sudden pall of silence. And then, with all eyes upon her, she calmly wiped the sides of her mouth and headed for the staircase – Sid’s eyes focusing like a laser on her as she shakily ascended. Cantor Schlag calmly deposited his spoon into a bowl of horseradish and resumed discussion with his brother.

Haka? Haka sheem? one of Sid’s youthful bookends softly whispered in his ear as Sid intently watched Mrs. Schlag ascend out of view. Sid instinctively lowered his head and focused on the brisket before him. Whether the child suspected anything unseemly in noticing him watching her, he could not say with certainty. However, he was reasonably hopeful that whatever revelation the child might have would be buried under the incomprehensible gibberish of his native-born patois. Haka haka sheem the child quietly nodded.

Mrs. Schlag never reappeared that evening, leaving her frazzled sister-in-law to quarterback the remainder of the meal. However, Sid had enough of a visual helping to keep himself locked inside the washroom night after night for a full month: She drops the book. She picks it up. She drops the book. She picks it up…

With the seder behind him, he made repeated attempts to contact Benny. After five frustrating months of trying, it finally dawned on him that his son had fully and truly severed all contact. A bitter little ingrate, Sid would eventually come to think of him. To show such enduring hostility because of an insensitive remark or two – to Sid, this was unforgivable, but by then, he was far too empty about it to care, much less harbor any ill feeling of his own. As for Shirley, she consigned herself to the lonely prison of her queen-sized bed as Sid laid exclusive claim to the washroom, customizing it with pastel beige wallpaper to set the mood during his nightly forays of self-gratification. They were no more than mere housemates by now, locked together through the sticky inertia of time and habit. The television became her most cherished helpmate, mopping up the last vestiges of resentment in those moments when she was alert enough to take stock - its flickering images gently shepherding her to the closing chapters of a life spent vainly waiting for the payoff promised by the struggles of youth.

Three weeks after Succot, the Festival of Booths, 1976:

Shirley died in bed, aged 60, alone and estranged from a husband who, at the time, was a mere twenty feet away, locked in the bathroom while choking his chicken. Only three nights before, Sid had attended – alone – a dinner held in his honor, in which he was awarded the Distinguished Jewish Community Service Award of 1976. His photo appeared the next day in the Metropolitan section of the Times, depicting him holding a brass plaque, with Cantor Schlag and various synagogue notables standing alongside him. The caption underneath read: Sidney Irving Granot, 62, is awarded the D.J.C.S. Award of 1976 for selfless duty and dedication to the well-being of the Jewish people, as well as recognition for the innumerable efforts devoted to his fellow congregants at the Kielcer Synagogue.

Mrs. Schlag had attended that evening, and it was then, for the first time, that Sid had entertained the possibility of actually making contact – perhaps through a spontaneous peck on the cheek or an inadvertent congratulatory embrace. And although the expected contact never materialized, the sheer thrill of expectation sent him dashing to the men’s room before dessert, and then a second go at it forty minutes later before closing time – topped off by a third climactic session back home in his customized beige love palace. He called in sick the next morning, exhausted by the night’s activities.

On the way to the cemetery, alone in the hearse with his brother Marty, Sid thought about the woman he had shared his life with since the age of twenty-two. He wondered if he had ever really loved her, yet when he recalled the image of the sweet, innocent girl she was when they met, he realized that it was also this girl who died alongside the embittered old television addict who came to resent him, and it was this realization that, for the first time, caused his throat to close up in dread. Could, perhaps, that sweet innocent girl have lived longer, more fully, had she never met him? He found himself bursting out in grief, not in mourning for her demise, but in mourning for the demise of her hopes and dreams. His was the grief of compassion, not of personal loss.

It was only back at his residence, where he was to commence the ritual seven days of mourning known as shiva, that his thoughts turned once more to Mrs. Schlag, dissipating a good deal of the grief. He hadn’t spotted her at the cemetery, nor at the funeral service. However, he knew that it was highly unlikely that she wouldn’t show up, at least in the company of Cantor Schlag, to pay her respects. And when she arrived, what then? A heartfelt hug? A kiss – perchance on the lips?

His eyes remained glued to the front door as the mourners solemnly filed in to pay their respects. Blurring his vision with the intensity of expectation, he was virtually willing each incoming mourner to transform into the shape and outline of Mrs.Schlag. But the blurry projection would not fasten onto the gangly shapes that filed in. And then he saw him. Benny.

“Hi, Pop.” A little paunchier, perhaps – the greasy brown “shag” cut replaced by a greasy brown comb-over – but he hadn’t aged so much over the years. Sid flashed him a crooked half-smile, and with that, Benny collapsed into his arms, shuddering uncontrollably. “I’m sorry, Pop. I’m so sorry.” He was working as a podiatrist somewhere in Pittsburgh. As for Autumn, they had consummated their love in a “nature ceremony” by making love under the stars in a corn field. Although not exactly legally married, that one encounter led to the birth of a baby daughter, named Winter. Three years later, Autumn reverted back to her original name after passing her final correspondence exam in Accounting. And – a small point – she also reverted back to poor eating habits and a sedentary lifestyle. “You were right all along, Pop. It wasn’t a soul bond or companionship or anything as deep as that. I destroyed my life. I joined a nature commune – adopted her adopted religion, for chrissake! – and I sort of brainwashed myself into believing we were meant for each other. And why? Because…well, I was obsessed with her buttocks. She had…a really great peach-shaped ass.” Benny collapsed into his father’s arms once more, sobbing uncontrollably. “I’m such a fool!”

At this point, Sid looked up, and standing before him was Cantor Schlag and Mrs. Schlag herself, resplendent in a sky blue wool skirt and blazer. She instinctively placed her hand on Benny’s shoulder. He stopped crying momentarily and turned to her. “I’m so sorry about your mother,” she sympathetically cooed, her red-rimmed eyes growing moist. At this point, Benny stood up slowly, struggling to regain his composure, attempting to vacuum a loose stream of mucous back up his nostril cavity. “That’s okay, sweetheart. Let it out,” she assured him. And with that, he broke down once more, resting his head on her shoulder. She took him tightly in her arms, rocking him back and forth. “Sssh. Shhh. You’ll be okay.”

Sid looked on blankly at the scene. Cantor Schlag knelt down, facing him eye-to-eye. “You okay, Sid?”

“Uh uh,” Sid blankly responded.

“That’s okay,” Cantor Schlag asserted. “You can let it all out.” And with that, he took Sid tightly in his arms, rocking him back and forth. “Sssh. Sssh. You’ll be okay.”

Benny turned his face back toward Sid, tears streaming down his cheeks and mucous channeling down his chin, as Mrs. Schlag cuddled the nape of his neck. “I’m so sorry, Pop. You were right all along. You were so right…”

That bastard, Sid cursed to himself as he stared daggers at his son, while the Cantor cuddled the nape of his neck. That sonofabitch bastard!

Five weeks before Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, 1987:

One lone, thin stream of natural sunlight managed to cut through the dirt-encrusted windows, illuminating the simple pine casket lying at the head of the sanctuary. There were perhaps no more than fifty mourners in attendance, all mostly elderly, and very few of whom now lived within an appreciable walking distance from the synagogue. Most of the older member families – the Goldshlags, the Schlaggers, et al. – had by now long dispersed throughout a good part of the American heartland, in a demographic recapitulation of the Great American Migration. In short, there was very little of Kielce left at Kielcer.

Rabbi Goldshlag, having passed away eight years previously, left the synagogue, for the first time in its history, without any spiritual guidance. Most of the younger observant families were either in the suburbs or throwing in their lot with the newly resurgent communities on the Upper West Side. And, worst of all, after Hy Goldshlag was felled by a lacerated ulcer, they now had difficulty rounding up the required ten adult Jewish males for a prayer quorum.

It was within this decaying atmosphere that Sid would furnish Kielcer with a gift that would perhaps illuminate Kielcer’s legacy, if not its future – a pair of brass lions to adorn the Holy Ark at the head of the sanctuary. He offered the gift in honor of Cantor Schlag, who was fighting a losing battle with throat cancer at the time. Diagnosed with a malignant tumor a mere three months previously, he had succumbed in the early hours of the previous day. And now, as Sid stood at the head of the sanctuary - the brass lions overhead reflecting onto him the dull glare of the artificial light - he paid tribute to the man he had known, if not intimately, for close to thirty years.

Sitting before him was Mrs. Schlag – her once-raven hair now a gray shade of pepper, her once-beautiful eyes now obscured by puffy lids lined with deep tributaries. At fifty-eight, she certainly looked her age, yet when Sid scrutinized those corrugated features – as he deftly managed to do when her eyes were turned away from him - he could somehow reconstruct, from her deeply furrowed flesh, the pristine, taut clay that inspired countless nights of self-inflicted carnal release. And though what once was taxonimized as cleavage was now no doubt as mottled as the patchy throat that now crowned it, there was a still a stubborn continuity – an organic bond between this creature and the one of his memories – that her very presence continued to energize him as never before.

Seated before him was Venus, an untouchable goddess of desire, and now, with all taboos – biblical or otherwise – cleared away through the passing of her husband, she engendered in him an almost unbearable yearning. Standing at the head of the sanctuary, looking down upon her, he suddenly felt as if he had, at long last, ascended the unscalable mount. The ultimate consummation of thirty years of obsession lay before him – to touch her at last, to give flesh to fantasy.

He had spoken by now for twenty, maybe even thirty, minutes. He was of two minds: the one mind – the communal one - addressing the assembled mourners, touching on all the right notes… “Cantor Schlag furnished Kielcer with the full bloom of his heart…;” and the other mind – the serendipitous one – wondering what forms of contact would be accruing to him the day after the burial.

He finished off with a rhetorical flourish: “Who knows what forces lie behind the noble gestures of a man? In any case, does it really matter? That is between him and his Creator. What is important is the good deeds, the charitable works, that he leaves behind. We may never be able to solve the mystery as to what made Cantor Schlag so good, and so giving to those he left in his wake. But then, that is the grand puzzle that exists in each and every one of us, and we stand humbled in its presence.”

He knew. He could see it reflected in her eyes. Never had he spoken so expressively, yet here was his muse, the object of desire who so readily furnished him with the gift of eloquence. As he finished his oratory, he bowed his head, and stepped out among the mourners. He knew – he sensed – that it would come after all those many years. In the presence of her husband’s corpse, he would finally achieve the consummation of his most fervent desire – physical contact.

Stopping in front of her, for the first time in his life, he stared deeply into her red-rimmed, puffy eyes as she stared back. And then she wrapped her arms around him, gathering him in close and spontaneously planting a kiss on his cheek. “Thank you,” she softly whispered in his ear, her warm breath moisturizing his cheek.

And then…her eyes widening in horror, she pulled away. She knows. She knows! Exposed by a telltale bulge, embracing her as she embraced him. Stepping backward from him, looking perplexed, hurt, and mortified all at once. What is she thinking? What is she thinking?? he frantically asked himself. Does she know?

He would never see her ever again.