Another Three Dogs in a Row Page 21

  The bearded man I thought might be homeless was arguing with the security guard who had been directing traffic. As I watched, the man broke away from the guard and strode toward the field, shouting something that sounded like, “I know what’s going on!”

  My immediate reaction was that I’d been right, the man had mental problems. Aaron Feinberg handed his little dog to his wife and moved to intercept the intruder. A moment later, two of Feinberg’s elderly friends moved to join him.

  Feinberg tried to put his arm around the bearded man’s shoulder, presumably to steer him back to the street, and the man elbowed him hard in the stomach. Feinberg stumbled backward, and the other two men tried to strong-arm the man. The rest of the crowd seemed focused on the rabbi, and the security guard was out at the street entrance directing traffic.

  Rochester jumped and wiggled, then suddenly slipped free of his collar and rushed toward the group. In the past, Rochester had attacked anyone who tried to hurt me, but I’d never seen him take off like this against a stranger who posed no threat to me.

  I ran after him, calling his name, but his four legs moved faster than my two, and he was able to duck around people in a way I couldn’t. Ahead of me, the bearded man had broken away from Benesch and Namias and faced them defiantly, his fists up. Feinberg stood hunched over beside them.

  The crowd had cleared around the four of them, and Rochester galloped right into the mix. I assumed that he was going to try and knock down the bearded man, to protect Feinberg’s friends, but I was wrong.

  I was still a dozen feet away when Rochester raced to a stop in front of the bearded man, then sat on his hind legs. Instead of attacking the man, it looked like he was trying to protect him.

  What if the man struck out at him? Could he hurt my beloved dog? I wouldn’t stand for that.

  Then the man’s posture changed as he reached down and patted Rochester’s head. Feinberg and his cronies looked surprised as the homeless man began speaking quietly to Rochester and scratching him beneath his chin.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, apologizing to everyone for Rochester getting loose. “Rochester, come here!”

  “It’s all right,” the homeless man said. “I love dogs. My brother has a golden retriever.” He looked much calmer than he had when he arrived, though Feinberg and the others still looked skeptical.

  Rabbi Goldberg arrived beside me with Sadie, and Rochester left his place in front of the man to nose the female.

  “Joel,” the rabbi said. “What are you doing here?”

  Joel smiled, as if he wasn’t aware of the chaos he’d caused. “I came to see you.”

  The rabbi took a deep breath and turned to those of us gathered in a circle around Feinberg, his friends, and the man named Joel. “Everything’s fine,” the rabbi said. “This is my brother, Joel.”

  I managed to get Rochester’s collar around his neck again, and held tight to his leash. He was no longer straining to get away from me, though. The rabbi’s golden, Sadie, had taken his place in front of Joel.

  “I have to talk to you, Robbie,” Joel said. “I have something to show you. It’s about the Holocaust.” He began to pull his backpack from his shoulder.

  The rabbi held up his hand. “Why don’t you wait in my office and I’ll come join you as soon as I finish here.”

  Joel stopped, his backpack still on one shoulder. “Nana and Pop-Pop would want us to expose all the secrets. They didn’t survive the camps just to let the Germans win.”

  “The Germans didn’t win,” the rabbi said softly. “You know that, Joel.”

  “But they’re still here. They need to be punished!”

  “Joel.” The rabbi’s voice was stern. “Take Sadie and go to my office.”

  Sadie jumped up at the mention of her name, and the rabbi handed Joel her leash. “Okay,” Joel said, docile now. “Come with me, girl.”

  With typical golden retriever joy, Sadie accompanied Joel as he turned to walk toward the synagogue building. “It’s around the back,” the rabbi called after his brother. “There’s an outside door that says Rabbi’s Study. Sadie will lead you there.”

  After Joel was gone, the rabbi turned to Feinberg and the elderly men with him. All three men looked angry.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t even know that my brother was in the area,” Rabbi Goldberg said. “He has schizophrenia, and it’s been very difficult to keep track of him. We mostly communicate through email.”

  “He shouldn’t have come here like this,” one of the men said. His name was Saul Benesch, and he had recently commemorated his eightieth birthday by purchasing a Torah salvaged from a congregation in Poland, paying for its restoration, and donating it to Shomrei Torah.

  The other man was Henry Namias, and he and Benesch had been friends of Feinberg’s father. They, and the elder Feinberg, had run Shomrei Torah all my life. “Is this the brother you had the problem with in Milwaukee?” Namias asked. “We asked you about him when we interviewed you.”

  “He wasn’t a problem then and it won’t be one now,” Rabbi Goldberg said. “Joel just gets excited. He’s not a danger to anyone.”

  “He certainly sounded like he was trouble,” Benesch said, his voice quavering with age.

  “My dog is a very good judge of character,” I said, as Rochester sat at my side. “I’m sure he wouldn’t have been so friendly toward Joel if he wasn’t a good person.”

  Feinberg peered at me. “I know you, don’t I?”

  “Steve Levitan. I was a bar mitzvah here.”

  He nodded. “I remember you. Weren’t you the president of our youth group at one point?”

  “Vice president. But that was a long time ago.”

  “Well, nice to have you back in the fold.” Feinberg shook my hand, and I was pleased to have dissipated some of the tension in the group by speaking up.

  Feinberg, Benesch and Namias walked away, their heads together and their voices low. The rabbi looked around us at the group of people and animals and said, “Well, I should get back to blessings. Who is this handsome boy?”

  “Rochester.”

  “Thank you for coming today, and for helping out with my brother.” It took me a second to realize he was speaking to the dog, not to me. Then he looked up. “Is there any special blessing you’d like for Rochester?”

  I hesitated but then plunged in. “He has a nose for detection. He’s gotten us in trouble a couple of times because he’s found clues in murder cases.”

  The rabbi’s eyebrows rose but he didn’t say anything.

  “So a blessing to keep him safe would be nice,” I said.

  He leaned down and placed his hand flat on the top of Rochester’s golden head. “Adonai yiverecheka v’yishmerecha. May the Holy One bless you and protect you.” He stood up. “For a little extra blessing you can always bring him with you to my Talmud study group on Wednesday mornings. Sadie comes along, and I’m sure she’d welcome the company.”

  “I can bring a dog into the temple?”

  “We meet in my study, and Rochester’s always welcome there. And so are you. If you were a bar mitzvah here, I’m sure you already have a pretty good foundation in religious thought.”

  “Well, it was a long time ago, but I have been looking for something more spiritual in my life. Perhaps we’ll join you one day.”

  Rabbi Goldberg shook my hand, petted Rochester, and then moved on to a huge St. Bernard. Rochester looked up at me, his mouth open in a doggy grin. He’d be happy to join the Talmud study group if he got to play with Sadie.

  As we walked back toward where Lili waited for us, I saw Sadie leading Joel round the corner of the sanctuary building. The poor guy – he seemed to have lost his way. I had, too, though I hadn’t been a victim of mental illness, and I’d been able to find my way back to happiness. There were a lot of ways to be lost.

  I wondered what Joel Goldberg was so upset about. What did the Holocaust have to do with anything in the present day? And why had Feinberg and his cronies been so
quick to intercept him?

  2 – Difficult Decisions

  When Rochester and I returned home from our walk that evening, I heard Lili’s voice floating down from the second floor of the townhouse, and realized that she was speaking rapid, almost angry Spanish. While I knew that she’d grown up with the language, and that it still flavored her speech, I rarely heard her speak it with such fluency.

  Her voice grew louder as she descended the stairs. “Adiós, mamá. Te hablaré mañana.”

  “Your mother?” I asked as she walked into the kitchen, her cell phone in her hand. I had taken out a big eggplant from the refrigerator and was ready to start preparing the eggplant parmigiana I’d learned to make from a vegetarian friend in college.

  Lili sat on one of the Windsor-style kitchen chairs and nodded. “She’s mad at my sister-in-law for the eighteenth time this week. I can’t wait to hear Fedi’s side of this one. They’re really pressuring my mother to move in with them.”

  Lili’s brother, his wife, and two children lived in Parkland, Florida, which I understood was about as far west of Fort Lauderdale as you could get without falling into the Everglades. Fedi had added a mother-in-law unit to his house, but their mother refused to leave her oceanfront apartment, even though she was having more and more difficulty living on her own.

  “I can see why she doesn’t want to move. It would be a big change for her,” I said. “No more independence, no more living by the beach. She’d have to have someone drive her everywhere.”

  “I know. But change is inevitable and at some point she’s going to have to get with the program.” She sighed. “I have a feeling that the only way I’m going to make any impact with her is to see her in person.”

  Rochester crouched on the floor beside Lili, gnawing at his squeaky ball. “You could fly down for few days couldn’t you?” I asked. As the chair of her department, Lili’s role was primarily administrative, though she taught one class on Mondays.

  She pried the squeaky ball from Rochester’s jaw and tossed it toward the living room, and he took off after it. “I could. I have the vacation time, and the department can run without me for a few days. But I’m afraid my mother’s problems run deeper than just giving up her apartment.”

  “Your family did move a lot. I can imagine it’s hard to feel rooted.”

  “It can be. This apartment is the first place she chose herself, after my father died and she didn’t have to follow him around. She’s always loved the ocean and she was happy to find a building with lots of other Spanish speakers. She plays canasta with a bunch of Jewish women from South America and they do water aerobics in her pool in Spanish.”

  I had yet to meet Senora Weinstock, though I had spoken to her on the phone a couple of times. “Al fin un Judio,” she had said to me in our initial conversation. At last, Lili had found a Jew. Lili had flown down to Florida a couple of times, always in the winter, to spend some time with her family, and always returned vaguely unhappy.

  I understood what she felt. I loved living in Stewart’s Crossing, relishing in the sense of rootedness that it gave me. My family had moved from Trenton when I was two years old, and I had grown up in Bucks County.

  Back then, I’d been desperate, as many teenagers are, to escape the suburbs for the big city. After graduate school in New York I’d married and followed my wife to Silicon Valley so she could take a high-powered job. After Mary suffered her second miscarriage, I’d used my computer skills to hack into her credit records and set flags so that she couldn’t run us into more debt. I’d been caught and punished, resulting in the end of my marriage and my return to Stewart’s Crossing after a year as a guest of the California penal system.

  I finished slicing the eggplant and began breading it as Rochester returned to the kitchen and danced around underfoot. “You do not eat eggplant,” I said to him. “Go lay down, and I’ll feed you your dinner soon.”

  I pointed to the puffy round bed in the corner of the breakfast nook, and Rochester slunk over there with his tail down as if he was being punished. “I am wise to your tricks, Mister,” I said. “That sad look does not work.”

  He settled into the bed and looked up at me with a wide grin. I had inherited Rochester two years before, after the death of his previous owner, my next-door neighbor, and though it hadn’t been love at first sight, eventually he had become the main reason I’d come back to life.

  I’d come a long way since then, and I was grateful for all the blessings in my life. Now if Rochester could just keep from nosing into any crimes for a while, we’d all be able to settle in happily.

  As I layered the sautéed eggplant with mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce, my brain started ticking. A year before, I’d been named the director of Eastern’s Friar Lake Conference Center, responsible for creating and managing a regular series of executive education and alumni relations programs at a former abbey a few miles from the campus.

  I’d put together a number of great events and more on the calendar, but I needed to start planning for the next year. Maybe I could put together a weekend program on the political, sociological, emotional and financial aspects of immigration

  Once I had finished layering the breaded eggplant with mushrooms, tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese, I slid the casserole in the oven. I turned to Lili and told her what I was thinking. “You think people would be interested in a program like that? It would certainly be newsworthy, given the current political climate.”

  Lili looked up from her phone. “Do you know Andrea Del Presto in the sociology department? She’s been doing a research project on twenty-first century migration and immigration. Maybe you could have her put together a program for you.”

  “I don’t know her, but I’ve read about her research. We have a lot of first-generation American students at Eastern, as well as some who were born in other countries and grew up here. Many of my students are disturbed by all the anti-immigrant rhetoric you hear on the Internet these days.”

  “One of the young women in my Introduction to Photography class wears a hijab,” Lili said. “She told us on the first day of class that she liked taking pictures because she could hide behind her camera. That she felt safer that way.”

  She shook her head. “That’s so sad, that someone should feel they need to hide in this day and age.”

  “What do you call yourself if someone asks? Are you Jewish first, American first, Latina first? A hyphen of something?”

  “It’s hard to say. Ask me around Rosh Hashanah, and I’ll say I’m Jewish first. Independence Day? American. When I talk to my family in Spanish I’d probably say Latina. I guess I’m a mix of all those. What about you?”

  “I’m easier. Just Jewish and American. Hard to say which comes first because both of those identities are so ingrained in me. I wonder, though, what the next generation thinks.”

  “Sounds like something to ask next time you meet with them,” Lili said. “But I’ll bet they have the same trouble making distinctions.”

  I remembered Rabbi Goldberg’s brother Joel, and his comments about the Holocaust, and how the Germans were among us. In Sunday School we’d spent a year studying the Holocaust, including articles about Nazi hunters who had devoted their lives to tracking down surviving members of Hitler’s government, concentration camp guards and those who had ratted out their Jewish friends and neighbors.

  Were any of those people still alive? If they were, they’d have to be in their eighties or nineties, and they’d had to live for decades with the guilt of what they’d done. Was there someone like that living among us? Or was I putting too much emphasis on Joel’s statements?

  We finished dinner, and while Lili cleaned up I sat on the living room floor and played tug-a-rope with Rochester. I kept going back to the way he’d approached Joel Goldberg to protect him, wondering why.

  Lili came into the living room, drying her hands on a cloth towel. “I’m probably going to have to go to Florida, you know. But I’m going to try and hold out until
it gets colder here so it will seem like a vacation.”

  I mimicked surprise. “A vacation? From me?”

  She pursed her lips as she sat down on the sofa. “From winter. Though if you don’t behave I may need a vacation from you, too.”

  “I could misbehave.” I reached up and tickled her foot.

  “Now that,” she said, “is not a difficult decision to make.”

  3 – Close the Door

  Monday morning, with Rochester by my side, I drove up the River Road from Stewart’s Crossing to Friar Lake. Oaks and maples lined the winding road up the hill to the original stone buildings, and they were beginning to turn the reds, oranges and golds of fall.

  As I pulled into the parking lot in front of the original slate-roofed gatehouse, which now served as my office, I looked around, as I often did, and marveled that I had been able to nurture the conversion of a run-down collection of buildings into a modern facility with meeting rooms, a dormitory and a kitchen, as well as acres of walking trails peppered by some older as yet unused outbuildings.

  I had been stunned when Eastern’s president offered me the job of converting, and then running the property, because I was a guy with an MA in English and little management experience as well as a convicted felon, still on parole.

  He’d taken a big chance on me, and I was determined to prove I could do a good job. I’d worked my butt off during the renovation, and created a kick-ass series of programs. But every day I had to justify that faith by keeping the center going, continuing to engage faculty, alumni and students. It was a pressure I put on myself; though the president was a demanding boss, he’d never criticized my commitment or my work.

  I settled down in my office, which had a big picture window looking out on the property. Rochester plopped on his side next to my desk, and as I looked up Professor Andrea del Presto’s information I heard him begin to snore gently.