Tic Tac on his tongue failing to hide the brandy on his breath—gave Bernie a clean bill of health and pooh-poohed the idea that the boy might require psychotherapy. He assured the Karps that all the kid needed was a little more meat on his bones. Bernie was almost disappointed that they weren’t going to lock him up; he’d imagined himself chained to the wall of an asylum where paying visitors would view him on Sundays. It was an appealing image in its way, since he’d become partial of late to the notion of ascetic deprivation: Fasting, he’d decided, made him more responsive to transcendental phenomena. But at home the issue of mental imbalance, a taboo subject in polite households, was never mentioned, the prevailing attitude being that any problem if ignored long enough would simply go away. Besides, in view of his mother’s taste for sedation, the son was a regular chip off the old block. Meanwhile Bernie’s father was more distracted than usual, keeping (with the help of Mr. Grusom, his cagey accountant) the books for Rabbi ben Zephyr’s House of Enlightenment, which had recently moved to more ample quarters in a former Baptist tabernacle on a manicured knoll fringed in lilac trees. Julius Karp and Ira Grusom were working overtime to itemize the rabbi’s God-realization packages, from the economical fast-track to cosmic consciousness to the costlier but more scenic route to self-illumination.
What had lingered most in Bernie’s mind since the family meeting with Mr. Murtha was the reference to his recent birthday (for which he’d requested a subscription to Commentary and received instead a new watch), because sixteen was three years past time for the bar mitzvah he’d never had. Suddenly he felt duty-bound to remedy the oversight. Unmissed at home, he took the hour-long bus ride downtown after school to the old Anshei Mishneh shul just off North Main Street. A rundown brick-and-mortar building flanked by vacant lots, it contained an authentic cheder Torah, a stuffy room with a coughing radiator, water-stained walls, and shelves crammed with moldering volumes of Talmud and Midrash. Acutely self-conscious at first, Bernie soon grew accustomed to seating himself at the long table, where he traced with his finger the Hebrew letters whose shapes left corresponding vapor trails in his brain. He liked poring over pages as brittle as autumn leaves while recalling the Talmudic dictum: “Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.” The old men, often short of a tenth to make a minyan, welcomed him, inviting him to daven with them at their ma’arev prayers. A skeleton crew of old-timers fanning the dying flame of tradition in an otherwise assimilated Southern community, they made much of the serious young man come to study and pray. But while he enjoyed the liturgy, liked crowning his head with the dome of a kippah, Bernie felt himself to be a dissembler in their midst. His guilt was exacerbated by the silence he kept when he overheard complaints about the old fraud who’d set up a Kabbalah center in the suburbs, for Rabbi Eliezer had become a subject of much indignant chin-wagging among local Jews. And who, after all, was the party responsible for having unleashed on a gullible public the musty savant?
But on the other hand, when Bernie thought about preparing for his belated bar mitzvah, Eliezer ben Zephyr was still the only adviser he cared to apply to. While his cool reception from the rebbe on his single visit to the center did not augur well for their future relations, Bernie had never developed the habit of holding a grudge. Besides, he still retained a blind belief in old Eliezer’s sagacity, and was determined to make another trip to see him in his new quarters, where they could perhaps start over from scratch.
Then an unforeseen incident caused him to postpone the trip. It happened when, after hearing what he’d perceived as the music of the spheres over the school cafeteria’s public address, Bernie came back to himself inside a locker along an upstairs corridor. Light invaded the cramped space through a louver in the metal door that put him in mind of gills, so that he felt, due in part to the unnatural position into which his body was squeezed, that he might be inside the belly of a fish—albeit one with a Fiona Apple poster plastered to its innards. It was a peaceful notion and, done in as he was from his celestial navigation, Bernie made only