As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel by Elizabeth Poliner Page B

repeated sadly. Well, it feels just as bad.
    Mort was going to respond to his father, tell him to hang in there and that God would surely answer his prayers, but just then his brother Nelson honked his car horn. Mort shot up, grabbed his hat, and rushed toward the back door, leaving the Nescafé half-drunk and the opened sports section strewn across the table. Then he turned around. He placed the coffee cup and other dishes in the sink, and neatly, section by section, just as his father used to do, he folded the paper.
      
     
    He and Nelson were approaching the synagogue when Mort recalled Howard’s promise to drive that morning from Woodmont to Middletown in time to join the minyan. Then he recalled that knocking in his dream. His father had been right, he realized. It probably was Howard.
    As he and Nelson closed their car doors, Mort looked up and down Broad Street, scanning the cars parked along the curb for his Dodge. When he didn’t see it he looked in both directions again, this time searching not for his car but for Howard. He didn’t see him either. The person he saw instead, opening the synagogue’s side door, was his brother-in-law Leo Cohen, a man so frail it seemed for a moment that the simple feat of pulling the door wide enough to slip inside would be too much for him.
    Mort turned from the sight of Leo to that of Nelson. “Any minute now,” he told Nelson about Howard’s arrival, patting his brother’s ample back as the two headed toward the synagogue door, which by then had already closed. Mort realized, too, that Howard might in fact already be there, having parked the car behind the synagogue, where they wouldn’t have been able to see it from the road. Yes, any minute now, he sang to himself.
    Mort surged ahead of Nelson, his eagerness to get to it motivating him as always. His outpacing Nelson also had to do with Nelson’s being fat; his younger brother always lagged behind. Still, once at the door Mort waited for Nelson, holding it open for him. Standing there, hand clenched on the metal handle, one foot on the sidewalk outside the building, the other foot a step inside, he could almost taste it, the sweetness of entering the shul, the satisfaction he’d feel just a moment later, after closing the doors behind him to that whirlwind of American society, that melting pot of everybody from everywhere. For a few minutes each day, behind the synagogue’s shut door, my father could pretend it was just them: the Jews. They were in a little shtetl somewhere in eastern Europe, doing what Jews always did, and they weren’t getting blown to pieces. Or, he sometimes imagined of late, they were in Israel, the Israel that could be once the current truce matured into a lasting peace.
    As he and Nelson ambled toward the utility room used for the morning minyan—no reason to muddy the upstairs sanctuary for such a routine occasion—Mort could hear the mutterings, the hellos and how-you-doings, of his fellow minyan brothers. For a moment he thought he might sidestep Nelson, who in the hallway blocked his way and stalled him. But soon enough he was standing inside the utility room, a bare place with nothing but white walls, a wooden floor, and a flood of fluorescence pouring from the ceiling. Because the minyan would stand the whole time, the metal folding chairs that might have served the group remained pushed against the walls. For a few years already theirs had been a Conservative synagogue, not Orthodox as in Woodmont, which meant that the women could stand right there with them, but, truth was, the women had other things going on in the morning; they never showed for the service.
    So there he stood amidst his friends, the same pious group as in his dream. He glanced at Jerome Kaminsky, who stood by Nathan Novak, chatting. Then he joined Abe Leiberman, Stanley Levine, and Harold Sokull, who weren’t talking but waiting, and in doing so formed a kind of row.
    But where was Howard? he wondered, glancing