A Soft Barren Aftershock

  I should maybe take off my clothes and dance naked?

  He gave a mental shrug and savored the damp sea air. At least it was cool here. He’d bicycled from Lakewood, which was only ten miles inland from this same ocean but at least twenty degrees warmer. The bulk of the huge Tudor retreat house stood between him and the Atlantic, but the ocean’s briny scent and rhythmic rumble were everywhere.

  Spring Lake. An Irish Catholic seaside resort since before the turn of the century. He looked around at its carefully restored Victorian houses, the huge mansions arrayed here along the beach front, the smaller homes set in neat rows running straight back from the ocean. Many of them were still occupied. Not like Lakewood. Lakewood was an empty shell.

  Not such a bad place for a retreat, he thought. He wondered how many houses like this the Catholic Church owned.

  A series of clicks and clacks drew his attention back to the door as numerous bolts were pulled in rapid succession. The door swung inward revealing a nervous-looking young man in a long black cassock. As he looked at Zev his mouth twisted and he rubbed the back of his wrist across it to hide a smile.

  “And what should be so funny?” Zev asked.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just—”

  “I know,” Zev said, waving off any explanation as he glanced down at the wooden cross slung on a cord around his neck. “I know.”

  A bearded Jew in a baggy black serge suit wearing a yarmulke and a cross. Hilarious, no?

  So, nu? This was what the times demanded, this was what it had come to if he wanted to survive. And Zev did want to survive. Someone had to live to carry on the traditions of the Talmud and the Torah, even if there were hardly any Jews left alive in the world.

  Zev stood on the sunny porch, waiting. The priest watched him in silence.

  Finally Zev said, “Well, may a wandering Jew come in?”

  “I won’t stop you,” the priest said, “but surely you don’t expect me to invite you.”

  Ah, yes. Another precaution. The vampire couldn’t cross the threshold of a home unless he was invited in, so don’t invite. A good habit to cultivate, he supposed.

  He stepped inside and the priest immediately closed the door behind him, relatching all the locks one by one. When he turned around Zev held out his hand.

  “Rabbi Zev Wolpin, Father. I thank you for allowing me in.”

  “Brother Christopher, sir,” he said, smiling and shaking Zev’s hand. His suspicions seemed to have been completely allayed. “I’m not a priest yet. We can’t offer you much here, but—”

  “Oh, I won’t be staying long. I just came to talk to Father Joseph Cahill.”

  Brother Christopher frowned. “Father Cahill isn’t here at the moment.”

  “When will he be back?”

  “I—I’m not sure. You see—”

  “Father Cahill is on another bender,” said a stentorian voice behind Zev.

  He turned to see an elderly priest facing him from the far end of the foyer. White-haired, heavy set, wearing a black cassock. “I’m Rabbi Wolpin.”

  “Father Adams,” the priest said, stepping forward and extending his hand.

  As they shook Zev said, “Did you say he was on ‘another’ bender? I never knew Father Cahill to be much of a drinker.”

  “Apparently there was a lot we never knew about Father Cahill,” the priest said stiffly.

  “If you’re referring to that nastiness last year,” Zev said, feeling the old anger rise in him, “I for one never believed it for a minute. I’m surprised anyone gave it the slightest credence.”

  “The veracity of the accusation was irrelevant in the final analysis. The damage to Father Cahill’s reputation was a fait accompli. Father Palmeri was forced to request his removal for the good of St. Anthony’s parish.”

  Zev was sure that sort of attitude had something to do with Father Joe being on “another bender.”

  “Where can I find Father Cahill?”

  “He’s in town somewhere, I suppose, making a spectacle of himself. If there’s any way you can talk some sense into him, please do. Not only is he killing himself with drink but he’s become quite an embarrassment to the priesthood and to the Church.”

  Which bothers you more? Zev wanted to ask but held his tongue. “I’ll try.”

  He waited for Brother Christopher to undo all the locks, then stepped toward the sunlight.

  “Try Morton’s down on Seventy-one,” the younger man whispered as Zev passed.

  Zev rode his bicycle south on 71. It was almost strange to see people on the streets. Not many, but more than he’d ever see in Lakewood again. Yet he knew that as the vampires consolidated their grip on the world and infiltrated the Catholic communities, there’d be fewer and fewer day people here as well.

  He thought he remembered passing a place named Morton’s on his way to Spring Lake. And then up ahead he saw it, by the railroad track crossing, a white stucco one-story box of a building with “Morton’s Liquors” painted in big black letters along the side.

  Father Adams’ words echoed back to him: . . . on another bender . . .

  Zev pushed his bicycle to the front door and tried the knob. Locked up tight. A look inside showed a litter of trash and empty shelves. The windows were barred; the back door was steel and locked as securely as the front. So where was Father Joe?

  Then he spotted the basement window at ground level by the overflowing trash dumpster. It wasn’t latched. Zev went down on his knees and pushed it open.

  Cool, damp, musty air wafted against his face as he peered into the Stygian blackness. It occurred to him that he might be asking for trouble by sticking his head inside, but he had to give it a try. If Father Cahill wasn’t here, Zev would begin the return trek to Lakewood and write this whole trip off as wasted effort.

  “Father Joe?” he called. “Father Cahill?”

  “That you again, Chris?” said a slightly slurred voice. “Go home, will you? I’ll be all right. I’ll be back later.”

  “It’s me, Joe. Zev. From Lakewood.”

  He heard shoes scraping on the floor and then a familiar face appeared in the shaft of light from the window.

  “Well I’ll be damned. It is you! Thought you were Brother Chris come to drag me back to the retreat house. Gets scared I’m gonna get stuck out after dark. So how ya doin’, Reb? Glad to see you’re still alive. Come on in!”

  Zev saw that Father Cahill’s eyes were glassy and he swayed ever so slightly, like a skyscraper in the wind. He wore faded jeans and a black Bruce Springsteen Tunnel of Love Tour sweatshirt.

  Zev’s heart twisted at the sight of his friend in such condition. Such a mensch like Father Joe shouldn’t be acting like a shikker. Maybe it was a mistake coming here. Zev didn’t like seeing him like this.

  “I don’t have that much time, Joe. I came to tell you—”

  “Get your bearded ass down here and have a drink or I’ll come up and drag you down.”

  “All right,” Zev said. “I’ll come in but I won’t have a drink.”

  He hid his bike behind the dumpster, then squeezed through the window. Father Joe helped him to the floor. They embraced, slapping each other on the back. Father Joe was a taller man, a giant from Zev’s perspective. At six-four he was ten inches taller; at thirty-five he was a quarter-century younger; he had a muscular frame, thick brown hair, and—on better days—clear blue eyes.

  “You’re grayer, Zev, and you’ve lost weight.”

  “Kosher food is not so easily come by these days.”

  “All kinds of food is getting scarce.” He touched the cross slung from Zev’s neck and smiled. “Nice touch.”

  Zev fingered the fringe protruding from under his shirt. Old habits didn’t die easily.

  “Actually, I’ve grown rather fond of it.”

  “So what can I pour you?” the priest said, waving an arm at the crates of liquor stacked around him. “My own private reserve. Name your poison.”

  “I don’t want a drink.” r />
  “Come on, Reb. I’ve got some nice hundred-proof Stoly here. You’ve got to have at least one drink—”

  “Why? Because you think maybe you shouldn’t drink alone?”

  Father Joe smiled. “Touché.”

  “All right,” Zev said. “Bissel. I’ll have one drink on the condition that you don’t have one. Because I wish to talk to you.”

  The priest considered that a moment, then reached for the vodka bottle.

  “Deal.”

  He poured a generous amount into a paper cup and handed it over. Zev took a sip. He was not a drinker and when he did imbibe he preferred his vodka ice cold from a freezer. But this was tasty. Father Cahill sat back on a crate of Jack Daniel’s and folded his arms.

  “Nu?” the priest said with a Jackie Mason shrug.

  Zev had to laugh. “Joe, I still say that somewhere in your family tree is Jewish blood.”

  For a moment he felt light, almost happy. When was the last time he had laughed? Probably more than a year now, probably at their table near the back of Horovitz’s deli, shortly before the St. Anthony’s nastiness began, well before the vampires came.

  Zev thought of the day they’d met. He’d been standing at the counter at Horovitz’s waiting for Yussel to wrap up the stuffed derma he had ordered when this young giant walked in. He towered over the other rabbis in the place, looked as Irish as Paddy’s pig, and wore a Roman collar. He said he’d heard this was the only place on the whole Jersey Shore where you could get a decent corned beef sandwich. He ordered one and cheerfully warned that it better be good. Yussel asked him what could he know about good corned beef and the priest replied that he grew up in Bensonhurst. Well, about the half the people in Horovitz’s on that day—and on any other day for that matter—grew up in Bensonhurst and before you knew it they were all asking him if he knew such-and-such a store and so-and-so’s deli.

  Zev then informed the priest—with all due respect to Yussel Horovitz behind the counter—that the best corned beef sandwich in the world was to be had at Shmuel Rosenberg’s Jerusalem Deli in Bensonhurst. Father Cahill said he’d been there and agreed one hundred per cent.

  Yussel served him his sandwich then. As he took a huge bite out of the corned beef on rye, the normal tummel of a deli at lunchtime died away until Horovitz’s was as quiet as a shoul on Sunday morning. Everyone watched him chew, watched him swallow. Then they waited. Suddenly his face broke into this big Irish grin.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to change my vote,” he said. “Horovitz’s of Lakewood makes the best corned beef sandwich in the world.”

  Amid cheers and warm laughter, Zev led Father Cahill to the rear table that would become theirs and sat with this canny and charming gentile who had so easily won over a roomful of strangers and provided such a mechaieh for Yussel. He learned that the young priest was the new assistant to Father Palmeri, the pastor at St. Anthony’s Catholic church at the northern end of Lakewood. Father Palmeri had been there for years but Zev had never so much as seen his face. He asked Father Cahill—who wanted to be called Joe—about life in Brooklyn these days and they talked for an hour.

  During the following months they would run into each other so often at Horovitz’s that they decided to meet regularly for lunch, on Mondays and Thursdays. They did so for years, discussing religion—Oy, the religious discussions!—politics, economics, philosophy, life in general. During those lunchtimes they solved most of the world’s problems. Zev was sure they’d have solved them all if the scandal at St. Anthony’s hadn’t resulted in Father Joe’s removal from the parish.

  But that was in another time, another world. The world before the vampires took over.

  Zev shook his head as he considered the current state of Father Joe in the dusty basement of Morton’s Liquors.

  “It’s about the vampires, Joe,” he said, taking another sip of the Stoly. “They’ve taken over St. Anthony’s.”

  Father Joe snorted and shrugged.

  “They’re in the majority now, Zev, remember? They’ve taken over everything. Why should St. Anthony’s be different from any other parish in the world?”

  “I didn’t mean the parish. I meant the church.”

  The priest’s eyes widened slighdy. “The church? They’ve taken over the building itself?”

  “Every night,” Zev said. “Every night they are there.”

  “That’s a holy place. How do they manage that?”

  “They’ve desecrated the altar, destroyed all the crosses. St. Anthony’s is no longer a holy place.”

  “Too bad,” Father Joe said, looking down and shaking his head sadly. “It was a fine old church.” He looked up again, at Zev. “How do you know about what’s going on at St. Anthony’s? It’s not exactly in your neighborhood.”

  “A neighborhood I don’t exactly have any more.”

  Father Joe reached over and gripped his shoulder with a huge hand.

  “I’m sorry, Zev. I heard how your people got hit pretty hard over there. Sitting ducks, huh? I’m really sorry.”

  Sitting ducks. An appropriate description. Oh, they’d been smart, those bloodsuckers. They knew their easiest targets. Whenever they swooped into an area they singled out Jews as their first victims, and among Jews they picked the Orthodox first of the first. Smart. Where else would they be less likely to run up against a cross? It worked for them in Brooklyn, and so when they came south into New Jersey, spreading like a plague, they headed straight for the town with one of the largest collections of yeshivas in North America.

  But after the Bensonhurst holocaust the people in the Lakewood communities did not take quite so long to figure out what was happening. The Reformed and Conservative synagogues started handing out crosses at Shabbes—too late for many but it saved a few. Did the Orthodox congregations follow suit? No. They hid in their homes and shules and yeshivas and read and prayed.

  And were liquidated.

  A cross, a crucifix—they held power over the vampires, drove them away. His fellow rabbis did not want to accept that simple fact because they could not face its devastating ramifications. To hold up a cross was to negate two thousand years of Jewish history, it was to say that the Messiah had come and they had missed him.

  Did it say that? Zev didn’t know. Argue about it later. Right now, people were dying. But the rabbis had to argue it now. And as they argued, their people were slaughtered like cattle.

  How Zev railed at them, how he pleaded with them! Blind, stubborn fools! If a fire was consuming your house, would you refuse to throw water on it just because you’d always been taught not to believe in water? Zev had arrived at the rabbinical council wearing a cross and had been thrown out—literally sent hurtling through the front door. But at least he had managed to save a few of his own people. Too few.

  He remembered his fellow Orthodox rabbis, though. All the ones who had refused to face the reality of the vampires’ fear of crosses, who had forbidden their students and their congregations to wear crosses, who had watched those same students and congregations die en masse only to rise again and come for them. And soon those very same rabbis were roaming their own community, hunting the survivors, preying on other yeshivas, other congregations, until the entire community was liquidated and incorporated into the brotherhood of the vampire. The great fear had come to pass: they’d been assimilated.

  The rabbis could have saved themselves, could have saved their people, but they would not bend to the reality of what was happening around them. Which, when Zev thought about it, was not at all out of character. Hadn’t they spent generations learning to turn away from the rest of the world?

  Those early days of anarchic slaughter were over. Now that the vampires held the ruling hand, the blood-letting had become more organized. But the damage to Zev’s people had been done—and it was irreparable. Hitler would have been proud. His Nazi “final solution” was an afternoon picnic compared to the work of the vampires. They did in months what Hitler’s Reich could not do
in all the years of the Second World War.

  There’s only a few of us now. So few and so scattered. A final Diaspora.

  For a moment Zev was almost overwhelmed by grief, but he pushed it down, locked it back into that place where he kept his sorrows, and thought of how fortunate it was for his wife Chana that she died of natural causes before the horror began. Her soul had been too gentle to weather what had happened to their community.

  “Not as sorry as I, Joe,” Zev said, dragging himself back to the present. “But since my neighbourhood is gone, and since I have hardly any friends left, I use the daylight hours to wander. So call me the Wandering Jew. And in my wanderings I meet some of your old parishioners.”

  The priest’s face hardened. His voice became acid.

  “Do you, now? And how fares the remnant of my devoted flock?”

  “They’ve lost all hope, Joe. They wish you were back.”

  He laughed. “Sure they do! Just like they rallied behind me when my name and honor were being dragged through the muck last year. Yeah, they want me back. I’ll bet!”

  “Such anger, Joe. It doesn’t become you.”

  “Bullshit. That was the old Joe Cahill, the naive turkey who believed all his faithful parishioners would back him up. But now Palmeri tells the bishop the heat is getting too much for him, the bishop removes me, and the people I dedicated my life to all stand by in silence as I’m railroaded out of my parish.”

  “It’s hard for the common folk to buck a bishop.”

  “Maybe. But I can’t forget how they stood quietly by while I was stripped of my position, my dignity, my integrity, of everything I wanted to be . . .”

  Zev thought Joe’s voice was going to break. He was about to reach out to him when the priest coughed and squared his shoulders. “Meanwhile, I’m a pariah over here in the retreat house. A goddam leper. Some of them actually believe—” He broke off in a growl. “Ah, what’s the use? It’s over and done. Most of the parish is dead anyway, I suppose. And if I’d stayed there I’d probably be dead too. So maybe it worked out for the best. And who gives a shit anyway.”