The Rabbi of Lud by Stanley Elkin

my jelly too.”
    “Your Welch’s?”
    “My Smucker’s,” she said. “It’s Robert’s favorite.”
    Robert Hershorn couldn’t have been in his sixties but presented symptoms everyone regarded as the onset of Alzheimer’s. (It’s surprising how little we knew in Lud about disease, what with its being a cemetery town, I mean.) The stuff we got from the papers, the cover stories in the newsmagazines—a spotty and, in Hershorn’s case, loosely reasoned paranoia, a memory in visible retreat, sliding, that is, off the tip of his tongue (in most people his age there’s still this tension at least, this urgent, clumsy reach and stretch for forgotten words and names as for badly fielded ground balls, some nervous working of the visible will to hold on and draw up, like an inexperienced fisherman, say, with a bite on his line) and out of sight, slipped through the cracks forever. Robert hadn’t only surrendered the words and names but had almost absently, and quite possibly with some relief, agreed to the surrender terms. The struggle had gone out of him, I mean. Abandoning even his confusion. (That other big symptom in the inventory we all recognized.)
    As far as we knew all his autonomics were still in place. He didn’t appear incontinent. He didn’t smell of urine or the telltale clays. If he felt a sneeze coming on he reached into the pocket where he kept his handkerchief.
    He even drove an automobile, negotiating the distance between his home in Ridgewood twelve miles off, and managing the correct turns on the half-dozen streets in his hometown that would take him the seventeen blocks to the one state, then one federal, then one state highway again that brought him to the first of the three-and-a-quarter blocks to Seels, the vicious, anti-Semitic tombstone carver and Jewish monument names chiseler who figured that a jew buried was a jew nailed (and who probably thought “jew,” in lower case, as if it were a verb or adjective, and once remarked in my hearing that the pebbles and stones people placed on jew gravestones wasn’t a kind of calling card, or for remembrance, it was for the extra weight, to keep them down, in the earth), and who, at least officially, was still on Hershorn’s payroll, though anyone would have thought it was the other way around, that it was Seels who kept Hershorn on the books, for the humiliation of the thing, for the pleasure it gave him to see a Jew in decline.
    Robert even remembered how to use his tools, all that crisp cutlery of his profession—the variously weighted ball peens, chisels, bevels and gauged nibs. But had forgotten the Hebrew alphabet he worked in, and no longer knew how to use even the apprentice beginner’s open-windowed stencil, even for the least complicated Star of David or simplest ornamental menorah flame.
    So Seels gave him buffers, rags and smoothers, the employee turning the employer into some benignly tolerated Jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none sort, a kind of gofer-cum-handyman, and set him to work polishing markers and sopping up and breathing into his already defiled lungs the harsh marble dust and grating stone powders. I guess we wanted Seels to buy him out and fire him already.
    They’d been pals. Hershorn and Connie. When she was small, and even after he no longer recognized her and Connie had to remind him who she was every time she went over.
    As I say, a town’s only child has got to be at least a little spoiled, pulling the attentions of its laborers and artisans and taking the benefit of its folklore. The lunch-pail insights and time-clock wisdoms. It was Hershorn, for example, not me, who taught my daughter to read Hebrew. But now she visited only on assignment, Shelley’s silly, envoyed charities, my own wanton occasions.
    She was crying when she returned.
    “Tears?” Shelley said. “What’s-e-le wrong-e-le?”
    Connie scarcely glanced in our direction but moved through the hall to the stairs.
    “Hold it right there, young