A Chinese Bar Mitzvah, Barry Rachin [online e book reader .TXT] 📗

Maugham probably would have ended up a social recluse."
“I certainly hope you’re not suggesting...”
“When an agoraphobic, eighty year old woman invites a poor widower for tea, it’s a mitzvah, a worthy deed, not reason for sordid speculation.” He could have said more, but Robert's sister looked like she might deposit her supper on the living room rug.
Naomi winced violently. Her blotchy, bloated face morphed through a series of unflattering grimaces. “He’s after her money. You read about these things in the tabloids every day. Some emotionally vulnerable widow fritters her life savings away on some silver-haired Romeo.”
“What do you intend to do?”
“Put an end to this bathetic farce before it ends in tragedy.”
Retreating to the front door, Naomi flashed him a dirty look. “And for the record, that W.S. Maugham remark was a cheap shot.”


The following Tuesday Mr. Chen returned with Wei-shan. The dog had dropped a half pound and was stronger but only marginally so. “She gets out of breath easily." He held the pet against his chest protectively. "And every morning has coughing fits, but other than that...”
Robert listened to the heart. The murmur hadn’t gotten any worse. “You’re giving her the pills twice daily?” The older man nodded. “I’ll be back in a moment.” He took the dog into an adjacent examining room and drew two vials of blood.
“I didn’t receive a bill for the first visit,” Mr. Chen said when he returned with Wei-shan.
“Statements will be going out in a week or so,” he parried the question. “Are you familiar with acupuncture?”
Mr. Chen ran his fingers through a limp mass of thinning hair. “Not really.”
“I recently treated a Saint Bernard with epilepsy. The dog suffered crippling seizures on a daily basis. Nothing we tried worked.” He reached out and scratched Wei-shan behind the ear. “A colleague just down the road was using acupuncture in his practice. I thought he was a crackpot, but out of desperation referred them there."
“And?”
Robert smiled sheepishly. “By the second acupuncture treatment, the grand mal seizures disappeared, and the dog hasn't suffered an attack since.”
“Can he cure heart murmurs?”
“Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.” Robert held the door open. "As long as Wei-shan’s blood work comes back normal and her condition doesn't worsen, there's no need to return until the late fall. When you run low on medication, call the office and we'll have the pills ready next business day."


The summer petered out in a final blast of bone-wearying humidity and scorching heat. One Sunday in mid-September, Robert stopped by his mother's apartment. Mrs. Goldfarb was watching the evening news. "Did you get the invitation?"
The question caught him momentarily off guard. "Oh, yes. Joel's bar mitzvah. The third week in October." Naomi's youngest son, decked out in prayer shawl and yarmulke, would be reciting the ceremonial Hebrew verses and reading from the torah.
"Hungry?"
Robert shook his head in the negative.
Mrs. Goldfarb lowered the volume on the TV several decibels, rose and went to the kitchen. A minute later she returned with a glass of black raspberry soda and plate of coconut macaroons. "If you had come a half hour earlier, you could have visited with one of your former patients." She handed him a sticky cookie and napkin. "Mr. Chen and Wei-shan were here."
Strange! Robert had been to visit his mother on at least a dozen occasions since running Wei-shan's blood work, and she never mentioned either the Oriental or his hairy companion. "And how's the dog doing?"
Mrs. Goldfarb shrugged noncommittally. "No better or worse than the rest of us. The dog coughs her fool head off whenever she gets overly excited and still has to be carried up and down stairs."
"That's to be expected," Robert replied. The thorax was an anatomically claustrophobic space, no better than a one-bedroom, efficiency apartment for the body's most precious organs. Wei-shan's swollen heart was pressing on the lungs. As she slept, fluid built up, leading to the coughing-retching episodes. Sometimes, in worse case scenarios, the delicate trachea collapsed from physical duress. But Robert had no intention sharing that morbid bit of incidental trivia with either his mother or Wei-shan's master.
"He's a retired school teacher," Mrs. Goldfarb said.
"I didn't know that."
"Still teaches creative writing and poetry to inner city kids in an after school program."
"Mr. Chen?"
"He doesn't get paid. It's just volunteer work." His mother left the room a second time and returned with a slip of paper. "The man's rather partial to Haiku." She handed him the slip. Robert read the verse that was fashioned in a flowery calligraphy:

My heart that was rapt away
by the wild cherry blossoms --
will it return to my body
when they scatter?
Kotomichi


"Haiku is a Japanese form," he noted laying the paper down on an end table.
"Yes, well, his literary tastes are rather eclectic."
Robert couldn't linger. He had to get home. His daughter was taking skating lessons and he needed to shuttle her to the rink."The dog is doing reasonably well, then?"
Mrs. Goldfarb did not reply immediately. "She hasn't had any more fainting fits, if that's what you mean." The woman fidgeted with her stubby hands, glanced at her son briefly and looked away. "Regarding Joel's bar mitzvah, Mr. Chen will be accompanying me."
"Okay." Robert was having trouble visualizing the scene. There would be the traditional ice sculptures, a chopped liver pâté, a sea of Semitic faces, the bearded, ultra-conservative Rabbi Jacob Goldstein decked out in an ornate robe, and the widower, Mr. Chen."
"What about Wei-shan… is she on the guest list?"
"I already told your sister," Mrs. Goldfarb ignored the silly banter, "and, needless-to-say she didn't take the news very well."
"When did you speak with her?"
"A half hour ago."
Robert did some mental calculations. Either there would be a shrill message waiting for him on the answering machine or, more likely, Naomi would show up unannounced as he was preparing for bed and harangue him for the better part of an hour with her paranoid conspiracy theories.
"Bringing Mr. Chen… it's non-negotiable," Mrs. Goldfarb picked up the thread of her previous remark. "At my delicate age, I do as I please."
Robert lifted up the slip of paper and read the verse a second time. "Who is Kotomichi?"
"A seventeenth century poet. Quite famous among his own kind."
"Naomi seems to think Mr. Chen has ulterior, pecuniary motives."
"Yes, I know. She told me so in rather graphic terms."
Robert could picture his sister haranguing the mother with scandalous accusations. "And what do you think?"
"Mr. Chen is an old man with a sick dog."


An old man with a sick dog…
Wei-shan's' breathing was labored, too shallow, too rapid - the flailing heart too weak for the extravagant, insatiable demands of the flesh. Studying the animal's rheumy eyes, Robert witnessed physical distress, weariness and fear. He also sensed an abiding love for the frail Chinaman who carried her into the examining room.
When Robert finished the medical workup and the visit was over, the elderly widower lifted his dog in a scrupulously efficient manner. It was the sort of thing only a savvy animal breeder or vet would ever notice. He grabbed the animal rather forcefully by the scruff of the neck, curled the free hand around the dog's hind quarters slipping the splayed fingers beneath the belly. Lifting with both hands in a deft, choreograph motion, he cradled the torso across the length of his left forearm. The other arm immediately engaged the rib cage forming a perfect cradle - a warm and comforting bed of flesh. The dog was an invalid; any awkward or jarring motion was an affront to the infirmed. Only a man who had rehearsed that move a hundred - no, a thousand - times could pull it off with such effortless aplomb. The animal's suffering congealed in a solid lump of heartache that played itself out in the corners of Mr. Chen's thin lips along with the lingering moistness in the corners of his eyes.
Robert's sister called Mr. Chen a conniving lothario, a gold-digging, slant-eyed charlatan. She never saw how he lifted his best friend, never witnessed the intimacy, the commonality, between the Chinaman and his damaged dog.


On the landing Robert waited for the elevator.
Ding! A bell rang softly and the lift arrived just as the door to Mrs. Goldfarb’s apartment creaked open. “Mr. Chen will be accompanying me to Joel's bar mitzvah,” the older woman stated in a no-nonsense tone.
“Yes, I heard you the first time.”
“If Naomi continues to make a hullabaloo over it, I simply won’t attend.”
Robert stepped into the elevator but leaned back out just as the door began to close. “And neither will I, Mother.”


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Publication Date: 07-15-2010

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