Mystery Rabbi

My mother lives in hospice. Her chaplain’s name is Joe. When your parents are old and ill, when you’re dealing with people you’ve never dealt with before, when you’re drowning in names, some names stick. Others flood past. You never know why. Joe. Her chaplain’s name is Joe.

Chaplain Joe called me. He knew a traveling rabbi who could visit my parents at their nursing home. “Would you like me to call him?” Chaplain Joe asked, in the reassuring pace of hospice.

“Yes,” I said. “Thanks. Of course. What’s the rabbi’s name?”

Chaplain Joe didn’t know the name of the rabbi he knew. He required a lengthy, steady sentence to say so.

It was Monday. I was working. I was pretending to work. I was pretending to work at my desk, marooned in a mouse maze of cubicles. Lately, I had spent most of my days not at my desk but on the run. My phone would detonate and I would dart into an empty conference room or a supply room stacked with paper or a closet filled with jackets or a courtyard filled with rain and field the latest calls. Nurses, doctors, lawyers, social workers, administrators. Hospice chaplains.

The calls and my sprints to privacy reminded me of college and taking infield practice from the sadistic coach who had never made it out of the minors—a barrage of line drives and grounders that had to be dealt with instantly, with the next one on the way.

I checked my impatience with Chaplain Joe like yanking on a dog’s choke chain.

“Nevermind,” I told him. I could live without knowing the rabbi’s name. When you’re trying to close, and you are always trying to close, you listen. You make encouraging noises. When it’s your turn to speak, you don’t speak quickly to make up for your customer’s lack of quick. I eased way up on the accelerator.

“Would you call this rabbi?” I asked.  

Chaplain Joe was happy to have something he could do for me. “I’ll call him now,” he said. He ended the call with some measured, solid sentences.

My father also lives in hospice. His chaplain’s name is Jane. Chaplain Jane. Though my parents had been assigned to the same room at the nursing home, they had also been assigned separate chaplains. This mistake could not be explained or corrected. Some battles you fight, some you forgo. Chaplain Joe is a Lutheran. Chaplain Jane is an Episcopalian. Or it was the reverse. I have never understood Protestants and their teams.

Chaplain Jane called me at work to inform me, after what seemed to be an elapsed time of forever, that Chaplain Joe had told her about a traveling rabbi who could visit my mother. Would I like him to visit my father, too?

I had just returned from the courtyard, where I had conferred with my father’s cardiologist while I paced in a patter of snow like confetti, the snow we often receive in Boston and Plymouth and the other towns along the ocean, so perfect airborne, so unloved after a week of boots and car exhaust. I was sitting at my desk and my button-down shirt was sticking to me and I didn’t have the energy to jump again. Fortunately, Mags wasn’t in her cubicle on my left. If only we could still work from home. When the pandemic stumbled to its end, our employer had gathered us up like strays on the hills and returned us to this sad little corral with its 50-shades-of-gray color palette.

If this rabbi, whoever he was, was visiting my mother in the nursing home, why would he need a separate invitation to visit my father, who was in the same room, in the next bed?

“Yes, Jane,” I said. “Absolutely. Yes.” I made the mistake of asking a question: “What’s the rabbi’s name?” Chaplain Jane didn’t know the name of the rabbi either. This required a one-word-at-a-time explanation.

Chaplain Jane asked if I would like her to call Chaplain Joe to learn this elusive name, but I could foresee a call that would never end, and meanwhile a call was incoming from another of my father’s specialists, and an invitation for a team-building birthday party had popped up on my screen. I wanted these calls and conferences with doctors and decisions that could never be reversed to stop, but they wouldn’t stop until my parents were dead. I could see their deaths now, not too far up the road, and they would be awful, but then it would be quiet.

I shook myself as if I had fallen through a hole in the ice and clawed my way out. I said, “Nevermind!”

Chaplain Jane ventured into her calming, compassionate, and considered goodbye.

I flung “Gotta go!” into the phone and fled the call.

“The Mystery Rabbi is out there somewhere,” I told my girlfriend, Claire, when she called later that day. I had swiped a cupcake for Claire from the birthday party. It was wrapped in red foil and topped with a chocolate flourish like John Hancock’s signature. “‘Ready to ride and spread the alarm, through every Middlesex village and farm.’” Claire said nothing. I finally said, “It must be a lonely journey.”

“We should go on a journey,” Claire said, “even if it’s just down the Cape, just for a weekend. No one’s there in the winter. We could walk the beach at Chatham. Watch for whales.”

 “I can’t leave my parents right now,” I said. Mags smiled at me over the low partition between my kingdom and hers, then turned away, which is all the privacy an office allows.

“I’ll find us somewhere to stay,” Claire said. “Chatham is quiet. Wellfleet is really quiet. That bridge over the marsh. The Italian place with the glassed-in fire in the center of the tables.”

Claire was trying to close. But Claire’s parents were alive and well and shopping for a new car. I controlled my rolling boil of anger at her, the world, and everyone on the other end of every call, first with a breath in, then with a breath out. I said, “I have to go. I’ll call you.”

All she said was, “OK.”

I ate the cupcake.

Near the end of the day, with darkness rising like a tide beneath the trees that ringed the parking lot, I told my brother, Hughie, about the Mystery Rabbi. I knew he would listen. He has to listen, since he refuses to appear in person. Hughie is the toughest customer of all. “He’s always on the move,” I said. “Visiting all the Jews, in all the non-Jewish places, unto the fourth generation.”

“Interesting job,” Hughie said. I could tell he was streaming something. I listened to the far-off sounds of airplanes or screaming or marching or whatever Hughie was taking in instead of talking to me. I counted the seconds until the back room of his brain remembered he was on a call.

“You there?” he asked. Nine. Not bad.

“I am. I am right here. You, however, are not.”

“Common-sense policies,” he grumbled, but I knew he wasn’t talking to me. “Terrorists are pouring over the border because we have no common-sense policies!”

On my screen I had a new meeting invitation. The project manager wanted to discuss deadlines. For a moment I wondered if he meant my parents.

“I suppose you think they’ll die and everything will be fine,” I said.

“What?” he asked. “Die? Who?”

Mags was back at her desk, so I couldn’t say “fuck” or anything else to my brother.

I said, “I’m going back to work. You stay where you are and don’t come back.”

“OK,” Hughie said, over the sounds of airplanes or screaming or marching. “Good. Bye now.”

Late that evening, I drove to the nursing home in the woods and pulled into the same spot I’d been parking in for two years. My tires in the snow sounded like they were crushing wet layers of newspaper. Good sledding weather. My mother taught us how to use our sleds. I walked under the two white street lamps that had been humming and sputtering since I first started parking in this lot, maybe since they were installed, stepping over or around rapidly graying shoals of snow, following the channels made by tire tracks. The snow was hardening into geology. I passed a white van, a motorcycle, a dark blue car and a dark green car, both the same model, all of them lined up like boats brought ashore for the season. At the entrance reserved for family I clenched my fists, opened them, stretched my fingers. My father patiently towed us on our sleds back up the hill. I sucked in the frigid air and punched in the entrance code.

The hallway air carried the ozone of antiseptics and an undertone of the pungent and expelled. I encountered an insomniac boulevardier roaming the halls in oversized pajamas with a bathrobe slung across his slack shoulders, trailing years like strings of tin cans. He smiled and nodded at me and I did the same, just two gentlemen passing on a busy street. The subdued green and white lighting was like a World War II submarine. I nodded to the women on duty at the nurse’s station in their brightly colored scrubs and their careful looks of concern. They nodded back. They knew me as one more upset, upended relative. We disappeared soon enough. We were always replaced. The nurses nodded because they knew we needed them to nod.

A nurse with orange dreads, wearing a white top covered with tiny swinging Spider-Men, stopped me with a wave from her seat at the nurse’s station and said, “Your father was hollerin’ again this morning. It took awhile to get him quiet.” Her name tag said Marjorie. Her accent said somewhere far south of Massachusetts. I wanted to walk around the counter and hug Marjorie. She smelled of cinnamon toast and a sunny kitchen.

“Is he all right?” I asked.

“He’s fine now,” the nurse said. The wooden beads in her dreads clicked like knitting needles when she turned her head, as she did now, swiveling in her seat to check the ancient man who couldn’t sleep. “But I wanted to tell you, he was hollerin’ again. ‘Get me out of here!’ Same as before. He was roarin’.”

“I hope he wasn’t too much trouble.” You never want to hear from the teachers that your kids are the troublemakers.

“No more, no less,” Marjorie said. “But your mama is a lamb. Always is.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” She raised her voice. “Now say, Mr. Pierce, whatever are you doing in my neighborhood? I’ll get you your aide and we’ll get you straight back to bed.”

I walked down the hall to Room 110, with its off-white cinder block walls and the two end tables covered with greeting cards and framed photos of grandchildren and small animals. My parents were asleep. I checked their breathing. All was good, or all I could tell was good. My father was a mountain under a couple of sheets, my mother a low ridgeline under her heap of blankets. His hair was white, her hair was salt and pepper. He sputtered and snored. She was serene.

I set my briefcase down by the one guest chair, fell into the chair, and contemplated my mother and father in the semi-darkness. Someone in another room was quietly playing Mozart. You weren’t supposed to play music at this hour, but you never let go of the good things in life, at any hour. The small white lights along the floor cast fans of shadows upward. The clock on the table between the beds needed new batteries. My parents slept on, deeply, peacefully. I was greedy for them, for every minute with them, for every word, but the sand of our lifelong conversation had run from its glass. I had no brain left for my phone or to scroll the worst headlines in the news. I closed my phone and my eyes.

I couldn’t sleep the way I once did, piled up for hours, unmoving. These nights I lay in bed, willing sleep to swallow me. And yet I regularly felt the urge to sleep, by day, by night, even after waking. When I did sleep, I sometimes dreamed of sleep.

In this chair, in this room, I closed my eyes and drifted into my earliest memories of the house I had sold because no one from my family was ever again going to live in it. I climbed over the rock wall that bordered the back yard, the first rocks set in place when Paul Revere was a person, not a poem. The wall was a couple of steps for an adult but a fortress for a child. The great forest beyond the rocks had grown from the lumpy fields of an abandoned farm. The trees and the hidden pond had provided all the adventure a boy could ask for, with a safe home to return to. I had once met a fox on a path behind a turn of trees, and the fox and I had yelped in fright and run in opposite directions. But now the two of us sat on the grass beneath the trees and regarded each other down the tunnel of our lives.

It was growing warm under the trees. The fox had vanished. I opened my eyes. A scratchy woolen blanket covered me. In the old house, I threw blankets over my parents when they fell asleep in the living room with the television on, actors moving and speaking on the screen without sound. This was not the old house. A tall man, with sparse blond hair under a small black yarmulke, was straddling a metal fold-up chair between the beds, studying my mother. He had reversed the chair and was steadying himself with folded arms on its back. He wore a black leather jacket over a Bruins hoodie and black jeans. A golden motorcycle helmet rested on the bed beside my mother like a marmalade cat.

“You looked cold,” the man said, when our eyes met.

I struggled to understand.

“I dropped by earlier, but they were having an emergency in here, and they wouldn’t let me in,” the man said. “Your father was angry.”

“He gets angry,” I said. Where was the fox?

“I could hear him. ‘Get me out of here!’ More than once.”

I sat up under the scratchy blanket. I knew I was awake because I ached in the way middle-aged people ache when they sleep too long on anything that isn’t a mattress with sheets, a blanket, and a pillow.

“I can’t get him out of here. I can’t take care of him outside of here,” I said.

The man nodded and said, “And he hates being here.” He held one hand out, the palm up, inviting me to continue.

“Yeah, he hates it. He was always on the move. He hated standing still. Maybe he hates me? I keep asking myself, what else can I do? But I’ve got nothing.”

“And your mom?”

“She doesn’t know she’s here.”

My visitor nodded. Then he said, “You poor schmuck.” The insulting Yiddish word rang in this cramped Christian space. “You are so off-base. Your father doesn’t hate you. He wasn’t yelling at you. He was yelling at God. God is who he hates.”

“You must be the Mystery Rabbi,” I said.

“That’s a new one,” the man said. “That’s flattering. I think. They didn’t tell you I was coming?”

“You’re more of a rumor than a reality.”

“It’s a wide circuit. I pile up the miles. They know me at every Dunkin Donuts from here to Hartford.”

“Why was he yelling at God?”

“Why yell at God? Why not? We’ve been yelling at God for four thousand years. God, what’s up? God, pay attention already! You think we just take whatever the Ineffable says and run with it? Have you read the Torah? How many of those people ever did anything without complaining about it first?”

“So we want God to fix this? There’s no fixing this.”

“Of course not. You can’t fix anything,” the man said. “Your father is going to yell. That’s his business. But that’s not your business. Your business is to witness. The next generation, they need to know. But you also have to take care of yourself. You have a lot to do. Like keeping your shit together.”

My mother, when she had her shit together, would’ve offered the rabbi a cup of tea and a nosh by now.

“It’s overwhelming, right?” the rabbi said. “That’s the point. To keep you busy. You don’t stay busy, the grief will eat you up. So fill out the forms, listen to the doctors, and when it’s all over go to shul for the Kaddish. Stand with the mourners. You’re going to be a mourner for the rest of your life, you might as well do it in company. That’s why the rituals. That’s why the chores. That’s why the religion.”

“To give me something to do?” I asked.

“See? You know this. You know all this. I just dropped by to remind you.”

The man stood and picked up his helmet. “Do the work,” he said. “Everyone else is doing their work. You do yours. Just remember, most of the work you’re going to do won’t be in this room.”

He picked up the chair with his free hand, twirled it, and set it quietly against the far wall. “And don’t put your feet up on this and go back to sleep. Go home. I mean it.”

“I didn’t get your name.”

“In your shirt pocket,” he said, pointing. “Call.”

The Mystery Rabbi stood in the doorway, raised his hand, and touched the frame with two fingers where the mezuzah would’ve been in a Jewish home. He stepped into the hall, remembered something, and spun around as easily as sliding off a motorcycle after a long ride to Hartford. He said, “The last voice your folks hear—you don’t know whose voice that’ll be. Right? Remember that when you use your voice.”

And then he was gone, like my fox.

“Did you have a good talk with your Dad?” Marjorie asked me on my way out. “He sounded much better.”

“My father is sleeping.”

“That’s good. You be good now.”

When I left the building, I didn’t flee, as I have so often fled this place. The white van and the blue and green cars were still parked. The channels in the snow were still deep. The motorcycle was gone, its tracks lost in all the other tracks. I stopped by the shining silver mast of one of the sputtering street lights and read the rabbi’s card, but it was too cold to stand around this gray space that had been bulldozed from the dense and silent woods, and I slipped the card back in my pocket.

I dialed Claire’s number as I walked to my car. My strides across the snow were measured, solid, paced.