Gospel, page 73
Lucy asked, “What’s so special about the wife?”
“She was 23,” said O’Hanrahan. “He was 84 or 85.”
“She was 22,” the rabbi corrected. “It was just a visa marriage, to get her out of the Soviet Union. ‘Mrs. Rosen’ was one of the most beautiful women that I have ever seen.”
“She was 23,” O’Hanrahan insisted. “I spent an hour trying to communicate with her at a party. Sumptuous dark Russian features. Anyway, she stayed at Rabbi Rosen’s house until accommodation could be assigned for her and the jokes … well, you can imagine the jokes. A 23-year-old-bombshell and an 84-year-old man.”
“Why do you keep correcting me?” Then Rabbi Hersch swallowed heavily.
“Something wrong, Rabbi?” Lucy asked. O’Hanrahan glanced up from his newspaper to see if the rabbi had become ill.
“No,” said Rabbi Hersch tersely, distracted. “Jesus,” he muttered to himself, “of course.”
He stood up.
“I forgot an appointment,” he added, seeming to curse himself. “I have stood this person up a hundred times—gotta go. Can’t believe it…”
O’Hanrahan: “Why don’t you make a phone call?”
“No,” he said, taking his sportscoat from the back of the chair and putting it on. “Gotta be running along here.”
Rabbi Hersch departed and O’Hanrahan and Lucy sat together in silence.
Lucy watched the rabbi shuffle through the crowd until she could see him no longer. Gabriel, she felt, had simply misjudged this man. Okay, so this spring he was in Rome where he wasn’t supposed to be, seemingly working behind Dr. O’Hanrahan’s back. He must have had some kind of reason.
“I’ve been meaning,” began Lucy, “to ask you a question, sir. About what happened in Rome this spring. You know, with Gabriel and all that.”
“Is this another attempt to get me to make it up with that worm?”
“No, this is a factual matter.”
He waved her to proceed, though he withdrew his hand quickly, clutching it, hoping to numb a sudden pain. Ah, the pains again!
Lucy: “That day in April when Gabriel stole the scroll in Rome and ran away? Were you with the rabbi on that trip?”
“No, he was back in Jerusalem.”
“You’re sure?”
“I waved good-bye at the ferry terminal.” He clutched his arm, discreetly. “You know differently?”
Lucy shrugged.
O’Hanrahan sipped the last of his wine and decided to pursue Lucy’s question. Maybe she had discovered something … but just then a shooting pain pierced his left hand. He quickly set down the bottle unsurely and clasped his hand in his lap. Was Lucy seeing this? He looked up to see her unaware, borrowing his Herald Tribune to read.
O’Hanrahan felt in his jacket. Oh just great, just fucking great: his Percodan was at the King David Hotel. His passport had been in this jacket and when he switched jackets at the hotel the Percodan remained in the one he’d thrown on the bed. Well, perhaps these damn circulation pains would stop. His left hand throbbed and the right joined it in sympathy.
It was getting worse, his condition.
In the mornings he’d wake up and his hands would be ice-cold, and on some mornings he would have pains in his hands and feet. He would get out of bed and stand so the blood would flow into his feet and then rub his hands under hot water, but lately that was not stopping the conspiracy of fouled circulation, arthritis, labile blood pressure, blocked arteries, and whatever it was that was plaguing his liver.
(Is that such a mystery, Patrick?)
He looked at his glass of wine and lifted it to his lips in defiance. If cirrhosis is going to take me out, so be it! It’s too late now. No liver transplant for such an old man—
The pain! He lowered his hand again. Yes, like clockwork, on cue, the arches of his feet commenced to ache. The more he feared an onslaught the more sure one was to arrive. Why does one’s own body conspire against one?
(You conspire against it, Patrick.)
Well, he thought fatalistically, a bad episode was to be expected. He thought of his being lost on Mount Athos, straining every bit of his body’s machinery, hearing voices behind every bush like a madman. And today’s little West Bank antics … It’s delayed shock.
“Something wrong, Dr. O’Hanrahan?” Lucy asked, identifying distress in his face. She stared through her round glasses, blankly concerned.
“No,” he said, “just … just feeling horribly tired all of a sudden. It’s been some day.”
(Lucy can help you get a taxi to the hotel, Patrick.)
“You really don’t look well,” said Lucy.
“Thank you, thank you, my support staff,” said O’Hanrahan rising from the table. “I saw an open drugstore back on the Jaffa Road. I’m going to go get some aspirin.”
“I have a few in my purse—”
“I don’t want any of that menstrual-cramps women’s aspirin,” he snarled. “I want some real aspirin, and besides…” His hand felt as if it would fall off, it ached so deeply. “… besides, I want a walk to clear my brain. I’ll be back in a few minutes,” added O’Hanrahan, not able to cover his acute distress any longer.
“Should I come with you?”
“No thank you,” he uttered.
The pain in his side throbbed again. It had gone away at this point before and that was what he hoped now. No, there it was again. His liver would go for days without acting up, for weeks, then suddenly it would be like a knife wound, a twisting knife, vibrating and poking at some impossibly sensitive nerve tissue within. In between the jabs, which coincided with his heartbeats, there would be a deeper yet vaguer pain that would spread and subsume the whole body, until making a fist hurt, every joint could reflect in some way the pain in his side, each breath would be an effort. That is, unless he could make it back to the hotel room and get the Percodan.
He kept walking. Walking helped, moving helped, bending helped. When pain is constant you can confuse the nerves by rubbing the area, O’Hanrahan told himself. The ancients thought the soul was in the bowels and if you’ve ever known bowel pain you can understand this a bit, for pain there is hell and relief heaven, more sublime and ecstatic than … than … Jesus, how many blocks to go until the King David? Damn it, he breathed, almost panting now, taking carefully measured steps at a brisk pace—it’s blocks from here, so a cab would be his salvation.
He attempted to turn around and scan the oncoming traffic, but in raising his hand to hail a cab the pain in his side nearly overwhelmed him.
Don’t stop.
If I stop, he told himself, I won’t start again. There was a passing group of laughing kids rounding the corner, a cat in the gutter drain picking at something: my final benedictory vision of this world!
The Ha-Malkah street met Gershon Agron and King David Street at the bottom of a hill; the Old City lit by spotlights, medieval and majestic to his left. See? Almost home, he told himself as if he were his own patient. Now just up this hill and we have it.
It might as well be Everest!
(Why were you such a stubborn old man, Patrick? Lucy could have run for help and you wouldn’t be in this fix.)
Ah, the voices.
(You didn’t listen to us about the drinking, about the unhealthy living, the smoking …)
I see we’ve got God the Puritan working tonight. I hate it, Lord, when You get like this … He laughed and allowed a tear to run down his face. He stopped and bent over. This might be it. Would anyone help me if I just fell over here in the middle of the night 200 yards from the King David Hotel? O’Hanrahan felt his forehead. Yes, delirium or something akin to it was coming on. Up the hill, one foot before the other.
He remembered the really bad times, he was so afflicted. In Chicago once, the episode that led to his getting the Percodan prescription from an old seminary buddy turned doctor. Then once with Gabriel in a shared hotel room in Rome. Murmurings all through Italy and Greece, and now in the Holy City of Jerusalem in the middle of the night on a deserted street with goddam Mt. Ararat between me and my bottle of pills—no, not Ararat with the dove and olive branch, but Pisgah, Mt. Nebo! With the Promised Land of his worldly ambitions glimmering at him from the valley, unreachable! And the Lord said to O’Hanrahan, This is the scroll that I swore to those before thee, and I will give it to thy rivals. I have let thee see it with thine eyes, but thou shalt not translate it and make a pile of money.
(Because you broke faith with Me in the midst of the people at the waters of Jack Daniels, in the Wilderness of Jamesons …)
God the Heckler, now. Catcalls from the cheap seats!
Then O’Hanrahan stumbled over the uneven sidewalk and fell without feeling it. He knew only the insistent, seething waves of pain from his side, his numb hands, the third and fourth fingers now insensible. It’s a heart attack, isn’t it? I read about this somewhere: burning in the throat, hands and feet go out. O’Hanrahan looked over to the other side to see a man walking briskly by. See what I mean, Lord? About how they wouldn’t stop?
(And no one spoke a word to him for they saw that his suffering was very great.)
O’Hanrahan writhed on the ground. A car passed by. Then another. A police car if it saw him down here might stop. O’Hanrahan, doubled-over, was near a hedge and there was a small, muddy strip of grass between it and the sidewalk. He pressed his face into the cool grass—yes, the strip where people walk their dogs. And he took a potshard with which to scrape his sores, and sat among the ashes, he remembered. I am full of tossing till the dawn. I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul. Job cursed the day he was born, thought O’Hanrahan, but that’s where our similarities end. You see, God, I love my own miserable mislived life, even in this rotten, broken-down body.
“Help me!” he cried out automatically as a pain pierced his side.
The Book of Job was O’Hanrahan’s solace in his own agonies. Let me alone that I may find a little comfort before I go whence I shall not return, to the land of gloom and deep darkness, the land of gloom and chaos, where … O’Hanrahan felt consciousness slipping. Where light is as darkness …
Someone was standing above him.
“Bevakasha,” O’Hanrahan moaned.
“I speak English, sir. Do you need an ambulance?”
It was a person. O’Hanrahan fought to be conscious. It was a male soldier—so remember the different endings in Hebrew. No, wait, he said he spoke English, I’m not thinking straight.
“I’ll call an ambulance,” the soldier said. He was in his twenties, dark-skinned and handsome.
O’Hanrahan fumbled with Hebrew: “Take me to the hotel.”
“But you need a doctor—”
“Lo!” pleaded O’Hanrahan, reviving under this ray of hope, “my heart medicine is at the hotel. King David.”
The soldier stood in the road in the path of some headlights. The car slowed. The soldier explained the emergency—would the man in the car be willing to take this ill man to the hotel 200 yards up the hill? Leaving the car running, the driver and the soldier ran to O’Hanrahan and propped him between them. O’Hanrahan throbbed numbly and the pain wasn’t so sharp now. A strange respite. His body knew, perhaps, the Percodan was moments away. O’Hanrahan was driven to the hotel and clutching his side he got out and went with the soldier to the desk and retrieved his key.
“You sure you will be well?” asked the soldier.
“Let me call you a doctor,” said the deskman.
“No, I am a doctor,” O’Hanrahan invented. Indeed, the deskman noted the Dr. Patrick V. O’Hanrahan registered in the books before him. “In fact, I’m fine now,” the professor said, actually somewhat improved.
O’Hanrahan thanked the young soldier profusely, thanked the good samaritan who’d stopped his car.
Soon he was in the elevator, soon in his room, soon wrestling with the top of the pill bottle. Lying on his bed he knew he had come close to the end. Slowly the drugs suffused through his body, his hands felt light, then his side became a dull ache, then a second wave in which he seemed to float in warm shallow water, in which he was lifted above the indignity of bodily degeneration. Ah, he breathed, his health again, here is nobility, here is God. Here is Heaven.
(If We could only be sure that’s where you were headed.)
AUGUST 8TH
O’Hanrahan was awakened by the phone. He came to consciousness with the sense the phone had been ringing for some time. He fumbled for it, alarmed anew that his fingers were so numb, his circulation so bad.
“Hello?”
It was the front desk checking if he was in.
“Here I am,” he said crisply.
There had been since last night five or six messages, several from an urgent-sounding man named Father Vico. O’Hanrahan prepared to castigate the desk for waking him up at this hour but then he craned to see his alarm clock. 1:30 P.M. He had slept seventeen hours.
“Thank you,” he mumbled. “I’ll be down in a bit.”
And as soon as he replaced the phone receiver, it rang again.
It was Lucy, calling from her adjoining room: “Do I need to get you a doctor, Dr. O’Hanrahan?”
“What do you mean?” he said, groaning the next moment from lifting his head off the horizontal. O’Hanrahan added in a ragged bass voice, “I am one with the divine.”
“You didn’t come back to the café, sir, and I didn’t have enough to pay the bill—I had to leave my wallet with them. But more important, I came in to check on you last night because you didn’t answer when I knocked and because the deskman said you looked gravely ill.”
“Total overdramatization,” he said, wondering if Lucy and a parade of others had stood around his bed while he was out cold. “I’d like to invite you to my levée, Miss Dantan, but the bathtub awaits. Unless you want to come scrub my back.”
Lucy wasn’t in a joking mood. “Rabbi Hersch’s coming over for the lunch buffet and we’ll be downstairs.”
God, the thought of lunch sickened him. He hung up and fell back on the soft pillow. I probably should stay here all day, O’Hanrahan thought, except today promised to be an eventful day, with all that was set in motion …
As he shaved, O’Hanrahan wondered what Lucy and Mordechai were doing meeting for lunch. Two people he could be sure of never getting too chummy—were suddenly so chummy. Morey’s trying to talk her into abandoning me, he figured. Mordechai wants her to go back to Chicago, drag me back there too, get me some counseling, another round of A.A. meetings or clinics, perhaps. Yeah, like hell.
(Wouldn’t hurt, you know.)
If I can get through last night, Lord, I can survive anything.
(That was a close one, Patrick.)
O’Hanrahan at the mirror stared finally at his creased, sallow face, his eyes growing sadder with each month, the blue of the iris dimming, the circles deepening. Great, he sighed, splashing his face with cold water: once I lose Lucy to the enemy camp, I really will be alone here.
(There is an ally you have never availed yourself of. One Who has been with you always.)
If Morey packs me off to Chicago, what happens to me? I have no home, no car, no money or place to stay … I will join the ranks of homeless. Or to hell with everyone: I’ll take Matthias Kellner’s deutsche marks or spend my final years surrounded by my harem in Teheran—
There was a knock at his door.
“It’s me, Patrick,” Gabriel called out.
This very hour, O’Hanrahan figured, giving himself a last complicit look in the mirror, will determine whether Patrick O’Hanrahan should consider early retirement.
* * *
The King David Hotel dining room. Lucy had been to the buffet for fruit and some revolting liquid yogurt stuff, into which she had stirred nuts and fruit; Rabbi Hersch had a plate of roseate, lean roast beef with dabs of horseradish and mustard to the side, and a separate plate with salad.
Rabbi Hersch said, “I’m going to tell you a little secret as a reward.”
Lucy brightened. “Really?”
“All this talk about gematriot, it jogged my memory. Do you remember Paddy and I disagreeing over Mrs. Rosen and whether she was 22 or 23? Suddenly everything fell in place—Rosen, the Kabbalah, the Gospel of Matthias.”
Lucy longed for him to explain further before O’Hanrahan arrived. She would love it even more if she got to be the one to tell the professor.
“You remember my mentioning the 22 Alphabets in the Alphabets of Ben Zira, that great kabbalistic work? Twenty-two Alphabets stemming from the 22 Hebrew letters.” The rabbi slapped the table. “Some kabbalists thought there was a 23rd Alphabet, inspired by a secret 23rd Hebrew letter, a most dreadful and powerful symbol, known only to God and Messiah. Do you know who Shabbatai Zevi is?”
She shook her head.
“I’m glad you don’t, actually.” The rabbi dropped a sugar cube in his coffee cup and stirred it automatically. “A most embarrassing episode in Jewish history. In 1665 he declared himself Messiah and everyone fell for it, great rabbis, villagers, illiterates and geniuses, bowed down before him. He was mentally deranged and his disciple, Nathan of Gaza, was just as bonkers; Zevi’s wife was a whore; he spoke the forbidden name of God everywhere. The Jewry of Europe and Asia rose up to be led to the Promised Land, but then the guy in 1666 goes and converts to Islam and lives on a pension from the Sultan.”
“Oops.”
“Oops is right. Anyway, Nathan of Gaza testified that this 23rd letter and 23rd Alphabet had been revealed to Zevi and to him. Rabbi Rosen, you’ll recall, solved the mysteries of the Gospel of Matthias within two weeks, right? He was also, briefly, Professor of Kabbalah here. I always figured he must have had access to some kabbalistic book somewhere that gave the key to the Meroitic language. Little girl, in the forty years since Rabbi Rosen worked on Matthias, I went through every book in his office and in his house. I have gone through every library slip of every book he ordered from the library, and then as the years wore on and I checked each book for its index—tens of thousands of books—I kept thinking one day, one day I would turn up the page in the book that Rabbi Rosen must have known about that held the key to this impossible language.”
