I nodded and wondered what he was talking about and had a moment of black dread that he had become senile.
“Where I grew up in Europe it would take days sometimes to deliver an important message. Lives would be lost because there would be no way to call a doctor. I remember my father, of blessed memory, once fell on ice and hurt his hip and was in pain for a day and a half before someone could bring a doctor. Now a man can pick up a telephone. It is a wonder, a mighty wonder. We should thank the Master of the Universe every day for such a wonder.”
I glanced at my wristwatch and squirmed on my seat and was quiet. I wanted to get home and talk about that article with my father. I wondered if that colleague of his in the yeshiva might have told him about the article. I wanted to be home when my father came in. But I did not move.
Reb Saunders seemed unaware of my discomfort. He went on talking. “The Master of the Universe has so created the world that everything that can be good can also be evil. It is mankind that makes a thing good or evil, Reuven, depending upon how we use the wonders we have been given. A telephone can also be a nuisance. But if it is used wisely, it is a mighty thing.” He stopped playing with the earlock and put his hand on the desk. “My Daniel receives many telephone calls when he is here. Sometimes they are from his friends in school. Sometimes they are from the hospital where he works. It is not so big a house, Reuven, that telephone calls can be easily concealed. Tell me, Reuven, Daniel has a patient by the name of Michael Gordon?”
I was beyond surprise. I was too tired and drained to feel surprise. I simply sat there and looked at him.
“Nu, Reuven?”
I nodded.
“This is the son of Gordon, yes?”
“Yes.” Why do they all call him by his last name like that? I thought. Why do they make it sound as if he were the only Gordon in the world?
“And who is Rachel Gordon? His daughter?”
“His niece.”
“Ah,” he said, nodding his head slowly and sounding a little relieved. “His niece. Rachel Gordon is his niece … Tell me, Reuven, the family of Rachel Gordon observes the Commandments?”
I was beginning to feel that I had no business answering questions about Rachel and her family. Let Danny answer them. Let Reb Saunders ask Danny. The days when he talked to Danny through me were over. Let him talk to Danny himself. I wanted nothing of that part of the past repeated.
I told him quietly that I thought he ought to talk about it with Danny.
He ignored me. “The family observes the Commandments?” he asked again, his voice somewhat sharper now.
“Yes.”
“And the girl, is the girl also an observer of the Commandments?”
I told him respectfully that I did not feel comfortable talking about Rachel and that he ought to ask Danny.
He blinked his dark, deep-socketed eyes and nodded heavily. “I understand,” he murmured. “You are remembering what was once between us and you do not want it again. But how can it be the same, Reuven? My Daniel is a man now, and men hesitate to talk to their fathers. A boy always wishes to be able to talk to his father. And a father waits for the boy to become a man so they can talk as men. And then the boy becomes a man and no longer needs the father. It is a strange thing. I worry myself about my Daniel. I worry that the girl he will find will not be an observer of the Commandments.”
“She observes the Commandments.”
“Yes?” His lined face lighted up.
“They all observe the Commandments. The whole family.”
“Gordon observes the Commandments?”
“Yes.”
“You know this by yourself?”
“Yes.”
He seemed really surprised. “How do you know?”
“I know Abraham Gordon.”
“You know Gordon?”
“I know them all.”
“Daniel tells me nothing.”
I was quiet.
“It may be he is afraid to upset me. The niece of Gordon …” He lapsed into brooding silence.
I told him I had to go home.
He nodded. Then he sighed and leaned forward against the desk. “I have been asked to write about your father’s book,” he said softly. “There will be trouble with that book. When a scholar as great as your father writes such a book it cannot be ignored.” His voice was heavy with sadness. “Rav Kalman is an influential man. There will be trouble. But I will not write about it. I will say nothing. I owe your father—too much. You will tell your father this for me.”
I felt myself nodding.
“There will be great trouble with that book. Rav Kalman has taken it upon himself to combat it. No one will stop him. But I will not help him. Please tell your father that, Reuven. Have a good Shabbos. It is always good to see you. Give my good wishes to your father.” He spoke very quietly and seemed visibly fatigued. “Nu, at least she is an observer of the Commandments … But the niece of Gordon … Ah, what a world we live in …”
I came out of the room and stood near the door a moment. A melody floated thinly through the hall. It was a Hasidic melody, wordless, set to the syllables bim bam bim, and it moved through the hall from Danny’s room. I stood there, listening to the melody. It seemed filled with quiet joy, its syllables, carried by Danny’s faintly nasal voice, rising and falling to the gentle, lively notes of the tune. Birn bam bim. Bim bam bim. It followed me through the hall to the head of the third-floor stairway, soft, thin, barely audible now, but its happiness unmistakable, a thin thread of joy in the silence of the house. I stood at the head of the stairs and listened to it. Then I turned and went quickly back into the hall and up to Danny’s door. I knocked. The melody ceased abruptly. I went inside.
Danny sat at his desk in front of the open Talmud and stared at me in surprise.
“The suffering son of a heathen writer is back,” I said. “The silent one is surprised. Yes. I can see he is surprised. I bear a message from the king. A telephone is a mighty thing. It can also be a nuisance, but used wisely it is a mighty thing. Don’t look at me like that. I do not as yet need your services. I am quoting the words of the king, the messenger of the Lord. Your father knows about you and Rachel. He asked me and I told him. I didn’t want to tell him. But the king has a relentless way about him sometimes. So I told him. He heard you on the phone. He knows about Michael. The king knows all. Have a merry Shabbos. Give my—give my regards to Rachel and her parents. I am going home to my heathen father.”
I closed the door and went quickly through the hall. I heard the door open behind me, but I was out of the apartment and going down the stairs. On the second floor I stopped and listened. The house was silent. I went downstairs and was passing the door to the synagogue when a dark figure came suddenly out of the shadows.
“Reuven.”
It was Levi. He stood alongside the synagogue door, thin and wraithlike in the dimness of the hallway.
“It’s late,” I said. “I’ve got to go home.”
“A minute,” he said in Yiddish. “Only a minute.”
“What do you want, Levi?”
“My brother,” he said, looking a little uncomfortable. “He will be a great psychologist, yes?”
I looked at him.
“Yes, Reuven?” he asked softly, eagerly. “Tell me. Yes?”
He needed the assurance. He needed to know that the years the tzaddikate would eventually take from his frail life would be worthwhile.
“Yes,” I heard myself say.
I saw him nod. “I am glad,” he said quietly. “Have a good Shabbos, Reuven.”
I came out of the house into the gray, cold winter and walked home through streets that seemed choked with scurrying Hasidim on last-minute errands before the Shabbat.
My father was in his study. He had seen Rav Kalman’s article. His colleague at the yeshiva had brought it to his attention.
“There is nothing anyone can do,” he said. “Rav Kalman has a right to express his opinion.”
; “He used me.”
My father said nothing. I told him what Reb Saunders had said. He nodded heavily.
“There will be other attacks, Reuven. But I am grateful to Reb Saunders for his silence.”
“Why is he picking on your book? I don’t understand it. There are so many other books he can attack.”
“No,” he said quietly. “Mine carries a certain authority. It is my reputation that he sees as a threat. He is a musarnik. He is defending the Torah.”
“He’s a sneak, that’s what he is.”
“Reuven—”
“He had me believing he really wanted to understand the book, and all he did was use me.”
My father shook his head and made a waving motion with his hand. “I do not want to talk about it any more. It is time to prepare for Shabbat. But you will do me a favor and not speak disrespectfully of one of your teachers. Now we will have to hurry or we will be late for Kabbalat Shabbat.”
But a few minutes later it began to rain very hard and we did not go to the synagogue but prayed at home and then had our Shabbat meal with the rain loud on the window of the kitchen and a feeling of gloom thick and oppressive all around us as we sang the Shabbat songs and chanted the Grace and sat around the table for a while, talking of Michael and Rachel and Danny and Rav Kalman and the way things had begun to change for me—and as the minutes went by I began to notice for the first time that week how tired my father really looked and to hear the strange quality of resignation in his voice, and it occurred to me that I had been so involved in my own problems with Rav Kalman that I had not thought to ask my father what had been happening to him on account of the book, what was going on in his own yeshiva. I asked him.
He gazed at me wearily and did not respond for a moment. “There are problems,” he said.
“What’s happening?”
“Some of the new people are—dissatisfied.”
“But what’s happening?”
“We will talk of it another time. But it is nothing to worry about.”
“They can’t do anything to you. You helped build that yeshiva. You’ve been there more than twenty years.”
“Twenty-four years,” he said softly. “Can they do anything?”
“I do not think so.”
“My God, it’s like living in the time of Spinoza.”
“Yes,” my father murmured. “There is that feeling sometimes.”
“Are those new people musarniks?”
“No. But they are all under the influence of Rav Kalman.”
“Two years,” I said. “Why couldn’t he have come just two years later?”
My father grimaced but said nothing.
It rained all through the night and the next day and we prayed at home and had our meals and talked. In the early afternoon my father went into his room to rest and I stood by my window and watched the rain falling on the ailanthus in our back yard, the branches bare and black and dripping, rain splattering into the puddles on the earth, rain streaking the window, rain blowing against the house in the wind. I thought of the summer and the lake and the wind against the mainsail of the Sailfish and the waves high and white-crested and churning and Michael moving back and forth alongside the center board and Rachel and I swimming in the lake and the old man in the carnival and Joseph Gordon saying “No Geneva Conventions here” and Molly Bloom big with seed. It all seemed another world and another time and I turned away from the window and lay down on my bed and tried to read a book but could not and I closed my eyes and listened to the rain. It rained all day and into the night and it was still raining when my father and I finally went to bed.
Eleven
I sat at one of the long tables in the yeshiva synagogue the next morning trying to prepare for the class with Rav Kalman, and found myself unable to concentrate on the words. Irving Goldberg sat alongside me, looking round and solemn and gloomy. There were about one hundred students at the tables in the synagogue and the sing-song of their voices was loud. I could see them studying and glancing at me. It had not taken long for the news of Rav Kalman’s article to get around. So I was the center of much attention that Sunday morning, and students kept coming over to talk to me about the attack against my father.
But there were those who did not come over to me but kept looking my way and talking among themselves and nodding and smiling, not without some glee, I noticed. And by the time the preparation period was over and we were all going to our classes, it was quite evident that the student body of the rabbinical department had polarized into two camps, one that agreed wholeheartedly with Rav Kalman’s attack against my father because text criticism was a dangerous threat to the sanctity of the Talmud, and a second that felt Rav Kalman’s article to be typical of his effort to make the yeshiva a throwback to the ghetto yeshivoth of Eastern Europe. There were loud arguments and they went on in the corridor and continued inside the classroom. I heard them all around me, but I stayed out of it. I was afraid of what I might say.
The church bells rang. The classroom grew silent. We gazed tensely at the door. Rav Kalman entered and came up to his desk. The bells ceased ringing. He arranged his books on the desk, lit a cigarette, and called on someone to read. I sat listening to the student read. Rav Kalman paced back and forth. He did not call on me. He barely looked at me. It is a strange experience to sit across a desk from a man who has attacked your own father in print and used you to help stage that attack. It was not difficult for me to hate him.
After class I had a quick lunch in the school cafeteria and took the subway. At five minutes to three that afternoon I was climbing the stone steps of the huge, mansionlike building of the residential treatment center.
Michael was waiting for me in the downstairs living room. He was sitting in an easy chair next to one of the draped windows, reading a newspaper. It was very cold outside and the living room was quite crowded. There was a hum of subdued conversation. A lavishly decorated Christmas tree stood in a corner and a large brass electric Hanukkah menorah was on the mantelpiece next to the schooner. I came quickly over to Michael and saw he was reading the Orthodox newspaper in which Rav Kalman had published his article about my father.
He looked up at me and blinked his eyes. “Hello,” he said. “You’re on time today.”
“How are you, Michael?”
“Did you see this?” He indicated the newspaper.
I nodded. “Where did you get it?”
“Mr. Saunders gave it to me on Friday morning. We had a session on Friday morning.” He sounded agitated. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.
We came outside and went down the marble stairs.
“Are your parents coming today?” I asked.
“Tonight. They’re in Washington now for a conference on Jewish education. Let’s go this way.”
He led me into the trees. The wind blew the leaves across the ground. The sun was bright, but the wind felt knife-edged with cold and I put up the collar of my coat. Michael walked bareheaded, one hand holding the newspaper, the other in his pocket. “It’s nothing,” I heard him say. “Compared to what they say about my father, this is nothing.”
“It’s enough,” I said.
“How does it feel?”
We walked on a moment in silence. “Uncomfortable.”
“That’s all? You only feel uncomfortable?”
“Very uncomfortable.”
“That’s because it’s nothing. When I read what they say about my father it makes me feel like a toilet.”
I said nothing. We continued walking in silence.
“Why did Mr. Saunders give you that?” I asked.
“I don’t know. He said I might want to read it.” We were walking slowly through the trees and there was shade and the wind was loud in the swaying branches and cold against my face. “It doesn’t feel good, does it? It feels very bad. It feels like you’re a bug and they’re stepping on you. Isn’t that what it feels like?”
“It’s not quite like that, Michael.”
/> He looked at me, his face pale, his lips drawn tight, the glasses down along the bridge of his nose. “Don’t you hate him?” he asked. “Don’t you hate Rav Kalman?”
I did not say anything.
“Like a bug,” he muttered. “That’s what it feels like. There it is. There’s my house.”
We had come to the pagoda-like structure.
“Come on inside,” he said. “Rachel’s inside.”
There was no one on the white-painted circular bench. I came up the two wooden steps. We sat down on the bench. Overhead the wind moaned around the sharply angled red roof. Michael put the newspaper in his pocket. He stared down moodily at the wooden floor, then looked at me.
“Why don’t you get out of there?” he asked in a high, thin, agitated voice.
“Out of where?”
“Your school.”
“Why should I get out of my school?”
“It’s full of spiders and cobwebs and old men who cheat you.”
I did not say anything.
“Evil old men.”
“They’re not evil. If they were evil it would be easy to get out of the school. They’re very sincere.”
“The people who burned Giordano Bruno were sincere.” I said nothing.
“Torquemada was sincere. You know about Torquemada?”
“Yes.”
“He was sincere. The people who excommunicated Spinoza were sincere. The people who excommunicated my—” He stopped suddenly, his eyes blinking repeatedly. “Evil,” he muttered through thin, curled lips. “Ugly and evil and sincere. So what? You don’t know anything about it. Are you going over to my parents’ tomorrow night?”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad. I’m really glad. You’re a friend. I never met an Orthodox person like you before.”
“Mr. Saunders is Orthodox.”
“He doesn’t go to your school. Besides, he’s going to be a psychologist, not one of your rabbis. He’s not yeshiva Orthodox.” He leaned forward intimately and pushed his glasses up along the bridge of his nose. “Listen. I was looking at the sky last night through my telescope. It was beautiful. I could see Sirius. I could even see its white dwarf star. I could see Procyon too, but I couldn’t find its white dwarf.” He was staring down at the floor and talking very rapidly in a high, tense monotone. I looked around quickly and could see no one. Michael went on talking. “Those red giants are something. They’re the opposite of the white dwarfs. Some of them are a million times brighter than the sun. Did you know that? Did you?”