Mitzvah Man

14

He and Lisa spend a quiet weekend together. A reporter for The Globe, a reporter for The Herald, call. The NBC affiliate picks it up, wants to bring in a reporter, a cameraman. “Sorry. Not on Shabbos,” he says. “How’s Sunday?” They stop by Sunday morning. Later Rabbi Klein visits, bringing bagels. Lisa talks him into letting her stay home and nurse him for a few days. Then he’ll drive her back to camp. She makes him lunch, she makes him dinner, she sits by the bed and reads Pride and Prejudice to him. Not to lose momentum from camp, she practices. And murmuring the Hebrew, she listens over and over to the cassette of her teacher chanting the haftarah from Isaiah for Lech Lecha. “Dad?” she says, sitting with him over tea, “you could have been killed. Suppose one of them had a knife. Or a gun.” One of them, he remembers, did have a knife. But he laughs, “I’d catch the bullet between my teeth. That’s what we superheroes do.” “When you couldn’t catch a rock? And then where would I be?” “Not with Aunt Ruthie. Don’t worry. I’ve written a codicil to my will.” “You better not die, Dad. I mean it. I’ll be furious.” He smiles at her to make it a joke; looking up, he sees it’s no joke. “Sorry, honey. Really—I think I was meant to help that young woman,” he says. “I hope God doesn’t mean for me to be a total orphan.”|14| When the flurry of calls by reporters is done, it’s like they’re on an island together in the middle of a world. They have to create a way to get through the day while he heals; they have to hammer in the posts of a life. “It reminds me,” he tells her, “of a time your mom and I went to Bermuda too early in the season, and it rained and was cold, and we made the best of it reading or playing cards. Of course, I’ve got the foundation . There are emails and calls to make. And it’s not just busywork.” “It’s absolutely not. It’s wonderful, Dad.” Judith Eisen stops by; she brings her son David, who hangs out with Lisa while Adam confers with Judith about the foundation. It’s painful. The second day, a headache. Then that dissipates, but every move hurts. His sensei comes by, a young Korean many-degree black belt, and they go over the fight and laugh. Laughing hurts. The next day he takes painkillers and drives her back to camp. Just before they’re leaving the house, a call from Cal. “You’re a hero here in the concrete canyons,” he says. “I heard it on the radio. We got a human interest story on our hands. They did an interview with that young woman and her mother. The kid’s a student, a good student. You’d be embarrassed how grateful they are.” “You heard about it in New York? Really?” “But this call isn’t about your heroics. I been thinking. You got a good project going. This Mitzvah Foundation. I’ll put some dough in. Okay? How does a hundred thou strike you?” It gives Adam and Lisa something to talk about on the way back to camp. “Three hundred and fifty thousand dollars to invest,” he says. “That’s already serious money. But I need a couple of million to make it really work. To build an endowment, give it continuity. Beyond personal connections, how do we publicize the foundation and raise money? It’s a big job.” This turns out not to be a problem. Adam expects the story to blow over in a couple of days. But it builds. He gets a call from Ben and Margaret. They’ve read about him in The Week. In Boston there’s an editorial in The Herald. Cameras snoop John J. Clayton 160 | through the house. The story makes a couple of news shows. He’s called “The Mitzvah Man,” and they translate this into “our favorite Boston superhero, the Mitzvah Man, Mr. Do-Good.” Larry Adler, the producer of a radio talk show, asks him to come on the air, get some free publicity for his foundation. “I’ve really got nothing to talk about,” Adam tells him...