Encore: Chapter 17

T

he meeting at Dr. Garvey’s home had gone nicely. The doctor had insisted they sit down and listen to his lecture about Modena history: he wanted them to appreciate the significance of the hotel building they now occupied, and recalled for them, in great detail, various celebrities who’d dignified the building with their presence. Once, he said, lifting himself off the couch to share this, Robert F. Kennedy had made a campaign stop at the old bar and grille in the hotel’s lobby. It was his dream to have Bernie Sanders pass through the town and he had all sorts of ideas about how he could work along with the yeshivah. Sholom Wasser had watched Shuey Portman nod eagerly, as if he shared the very same dream.

The meeting had been pleasant and it had been a small victory, but the lingering sense of frustration — he, the rosh yeshivah, had dropped the ball and it had taken Shuey Portman to help him figure it out — remained, threatening their relationship.

Shuey must have perceived this too, because he refrained from discussing any of the bochurim, as he normally would. Instead he told Rabbi Wasser about his difficulty in reaching the parents and how, for some reason, parents thought of tuition as a bonus, something they would deal with if they had extra money at the end of the month.

Where was the achrayus, he wanted to know, even though precisely six months earlier he’d given the wrong credit card number to the administrator at Shlomo Tzvi’s yeshivah, switching a digit, then pretended it was a mistake when they called to correct it. It had bought him two more weeks.