Thursday the Rabbi Walked Out Read Online Free

eyes narrowed as he thought of what the trip would involve, he’d have to dress up in a regular suit – with a tie, and shoes, he’d have to pack a bag and drive out to the airport, unless maybe Billy could take the morning off from the bank. But then he’d have to arrange to be met on his return, and what would he do in New York after he’d seen his man – what was his name? Leicester? Yeah, what would he do after he’d seen Mr. Leicester?
    The usual was out of the question since Hester was in Europe. So he’d have to sit in his hotel room and watch TV, hell, he could watch TV at home. Besides. Leicester might be out of town. “It’s not worth it,” he announced, and resuming his seat in the recliner, he picked up his newspaper. “Maybe I’ll just talk to Cunningham,” he said.
     
    In recent years. Ellsworth Jordon did not get to New York too often, but whenever he did, he tried to arrange matters so that he would spend some time with Hester Grimes whom he had first met in the fifties when she was twenty-two and studying at the Actors’ School, he was working for the prestigious architectural firm of Sloan. Cavendish and Sullivan, and though almost forty, his rank was still that of junior architect, she was Esther Green in those days, thin with jet black hair and large dark eyes, intense, serious, determined that someday she would play the great female dramatic roles – Nora, Lady Macbeth, Joan of Arc.
    He was tall and blond and handsome, for all that his hair was beginning to thin and he was beginning to put on middleaged weight, he treated her with a kind of whimsical gallantry which she found all the more attractive because it was not common in the Bohemian circle in which she moved.
    In spite of the disparity in their ages, they had been very much in love. For the six months or so that it lasted, it had been a hectic affair, marked by frequently violent quarrels followed by teary reconciliations, then his big chance came, he was to be sent to Berlin on a major project which would take several years to complete, he wanted her to go with him.
    She demurred, she had her own career to think of, and besides, although neither religious nor in any way connected with the Jewish community except by accident of birth, the thought of living in Germany was repugnant to her, the discussion quickly degenerated to an argument, and then, as happened frequently with them, to a quarrel, annoyed by her resistance, he was led to minimize the importance of her ambitions and then even to disparage acting itself as a valid art. “While I admit that it might be a legitimate way of earning a living,” he declared loftily, “it is essentially one that appeals to a childish urge to show off.” As for her reluctance to live in Germany: he felt that it showed that she still retained the paranoia of her race and that it proved that she was still bound by a narrow ethnic parochialism.
    It ended as so many of their quarrels did with his agreeing with her that they were no good for each other and leaving, as always, presumably never to return. Shortly after he went abroad, she discovered she was pregnant.
    Had he still been in the city, she would no doubt have arranged to get word to him, even if she would not herself have called him, and of course, he would have come, and of course, there would have been a reconciliation, and of course – But he was not in the city; he was three thousand miles away. Had she had family, or if her friends and associates had been of the middle class in which she had grown up, she probably would have undergone an abortion, even if it would have involved the services of some quack in a sleazy tenement. Or she might have gone out of town and had her baby in secret and then given it up for adoption. But her associates were all Bohemian and long on ideals, especially where the necessity of living up to them was someone else’s. When she suggested that she had even considered having the baby and bringing it up by