Fifty years ago today, Thursday, March 7, 1974, this story began when my father dropped me and my sister off at school and disappeared. Fifty years. A half century since I saw my father last.
Chapter Fourteen
Mom was in a hurry to get us out of our house because the new rabbi was coming to town. Rather than use his name, which still pains me to speak or hear, I shall call him Rabbi Awful, because that pretty much sums up him and his brief tenure in Utica. Ten years younger than my father, he was equally short and slender but that’s where the similarities ended. Where Dad was cleanshaven and bald, Rabbi Awful had a full head of brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard. After he’d been in Utica for a few months my mother began to say, “Never trust a man with a beard. You never know what he’s hiding.”
It was the first time I could recall her openly criticizing another adult, violating what I had been led to believe was our family’s golden rule: “If you don't have something nice to say about someone, don’t say anything at all.” It wasn’t as if I had been unaware that there were grownups that Mom didn’t like. Certainly she’d never hidden her feelings about Aunt Roz. But those feelings were reflected more in her behavior—the once-a-year visit with its frosty interactions. The only criticism I ever heard her level at Aunt Roz was actually about me in relation to Aunt Roz: “You’re a kalte neshama, just like her,” she would say, her voice dripping with disapproval on those occasions when she tried to hug me and I, not in the mood to be touched, rebuffed her.
Mom’s criticism of the Awfuls extended beyond the rabbi’s facial hair. She disapproved of his demeanor on the pulpit, his pandering to the wealthier members of the congregation, his wife’s failure to regularly attend Shabbos services, and his spoiled and snotty step-daughter, who was in early elementary school. She was particularly offended by the Awfuls’ taste in interior design.
They wasted no time making the temple house their own. They replaced the elegant crystal chandelier in the dining room with a bright-colored stained-glass fixture that reminded me of the ones at Shakey’s Pizza Parlor, Utica’s 1970s version of Chuck-E-Cheese. They covered the toile wallpaper in the main floor bathroom with wallpaper that Mom said had swear words scrawled all over it in different colors.
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