by Chaim Potok
Danny stared down at the phone and said nothing. He felt as if the sound of the phone were coming from somewhere inside himself.
“Who would ring at such an hour?” Levi asked in Yiddish. He held the robe tightly to his body as though he were cold.
“You think it is for you, Daniel?” Reb Saunders asked again.
“It’s the wrong signal,” Danny said. He had arranged an emergency telephone signal with the staff member on night duty: three rings, then stop, then ring again. That signal was to be used on Shabbat in case of an emergency with Michael. But the staff member did not know the treatment center administrator was calling Danny, and the administrator had no way of knowing the signal.
The phone stopped ringing. They stood there in the hall that had a single dim night light set in a wall socket, and waited. Almost immediately it began to ring again.
“It must be for you, Daniel,” Reb Saunders said. “They are calling you.”
Danny stared at the phone.
“Answer the phone, Daniel,” Reb Saunders said.
Danny looked at his father.
“Answer,” Reb Saunders said. “If it is a mistake, let the sin be on my head.”
But Danny remained still. The phone continued to ring.
“Daniel,” Levi said. “Our father tells you to answer the phone.”
Danny lifted the phone and put it to his ear. He listened as the administrator, who of course knew of Danny’s Orthodoxy, thanked him for answering and told him what was happening. Danny said if he did not call him back in five minutes it meant that he was on his way over, and hung up. He looked away from the phone and saw his father and his brother staring at him. Danny’s face was white and he had to lean on the phone stand to steady himself.
“What is the matter?” Reb Saunders asked. “Daniel, what has happened? Levi, bring a glass of water. Daniel, tell me what is the matter.”
Levi started out of the hall toward the kitchen, but Danny called him back. The three of them stood around the phone, Danny explaining, his father and brother listening. He spoke rapidly, in Yiddish. Had it been any other night of the week, he would have told them nothing. But this was Shabbat. He would be traveling on Shabbat. He had to tell them.
Reb Saunders listened until he understood enough to enable him to make a legal decision. Then he broke in on Danny’s words. “Go!” he commanded. “Go quickly! Pickuach nefesh. Quickly! Quickly!”
“Take a taxi,” Levi said urgently in Yiddish. “You will find one on Lee Avenue. And take money with you.”
“Quickly!” Reb Saunders said again. “Quickly!”
Danny dressed and his father and brother accompanied him to the front door and he raced along his block beneath the naked sycamores and found a cab almost immediately on Lee Avenue. He told the driver it was an emergency. He was at the treatment center in less than half an hour.
He went directly to the pagoda. He found Dr. Altman and the administrator and a group of staff people standing among the trees, shivering in the cold and watching Michael and the other boy, who were sitting on the bench in the pagoda. He and Dr. Altman held a brief conference. The administrator listened, all the time keeping his eyes on the two boys in the pagoda.
“Michael has obviously hooked onto Jonathan’s psychotic aggressions for his own needs,” Dr. Altman said. He was a medium-sized, portly man in his late fifties, with a kindly pink face, rimless glasses, and a graying mustache. Jonathan was the name of the boy in the pagoda with Michael. “He will continue manipulating Jonathan. We must get Jonathan to decathect from Michael.”
Danny said, speaking calmly and professionally and trying to keep from trembling with the fear inside him, that Jonathan was probably looking to be protected from Michael’s hostility.
Dr. Altman nodded soberly. “I will bet that with all his aggression coming to the surface, Jonathan is terrified of going any further and wants the stops put in. He is beginning to sense what the reality risks are.”
Danny said he would try to get through to Jonathan and break the aggression-fear-hostility cycle. He came over to the pagoda. The outside lights shone through the trees and cast soft, broken shadows across the ground and onto the pagoda. Michael and Jonathan sat close together on the circular white bench, their faces ghostly in the light of a nearby spot. The long knives glistened in their hands.
Michael rose quickly as Danny approached. Jonathan remained seated, watching Danny, his tongue running over his lips, his eyes bright and burning.
Danny stopped in front of the steps to the pagoda and looked at Jonathan. About fifteen feet behind him the staff people, the administrator, and Dr. Altman stood bunched together, waiting.
“Jonathan,” Danny said. His voice came out thin and weak. He could feel the palms of his hands sweating in the cold wind. “Jonathan,” he said again, a little louder.
The boy stared at him and said nothing.
“You know you want to come down out of there,” Danny said. “Come down and give me the knife.”
The boy sat very still and stared and did not move. Michael looked at Danny and laughed softly.
“You’ve come a long way in the past few months,” Danny said quietly. “You don’t want to slide back now.”
The boy licked his lips, looked down at the knife, then looked again at Danny. Slowly, he rose to his feet.
“No!” Michael said to him. “Stay with me!”
Danny did not look at Michael. “Come on, Jonathan,” he said. “Come down out of there and let me have the knife.”
“Don’t listen to that cheat!” Michael shouted. “He’s a liar and a cheat! Don’t listen!”
Danny would not look at Michael. “He’s using you, Jonathan,” he said softly. “He’s not freeing you. He’s using you.”
Jonathan stared at Michael. The hand holding the knife dropped limply to his side. He came forward, looking like someone who had just been saved from falling off a roof, and handed Danny the knife. One of the child-care workers came over and took him away toward the house.
“You bastard!” Michael was screaming. “You took away my friend! Just like you took away Rachel! You took everyone away from me! I don’t have anyone left! You bastard!”
“Please come down from there,” Danny said, and went up the steps into the pagoda.
“You stay away from me,” Michael said menacingly, and made a wide slashing motion with the knife.
“Give me the knife,” Danny said quietly, feeling the sweat and the panic, feeling Michael’s terror, feeling the wind on his neck, feeling the leaves blowing against his shoes.
“I’ll kill you!” Michael screamed, and made another slashing motion with the knife. His long, thin face was contorted with rage and his glasses were down on the bridge of his nose. His eyes bulged and his lips were stiff. “You took everyone away! I’ll kill you!”
Danny took a step into the pagoda. Michael backed away, moving sideways, his legs against the white bench. The red beams and roof of the pagoda were dark in the artificial light.
“Give me the knife, Michael,” Danny said again, taking another step into the pagoda.
“You’ll take Reuven away too!” Michael screamed. The words echoed faintly through the darkness of the trees.
“No one can take Reuven away from you, Michael,” Danny said softly, coming directly up to him. “You know that.”
Michael stared. His shoulders twitched and a shudder went through his thin body and he lowered his head and broke into a sob and the knife fell from his hand and clattered dully on the wooden floor of the pagoda.
Danny bent slowly and picked up the knife. It was long and quite heavy, the wooden handle still warm from Michael’s hand. He put his arm around Michael’s shoulders. He could feel him trembling. “No one can take Reuven away from you,” he said again, very softly, and led Michael from the pagoda into the house and brought him to his room and helped him undress and get into bed. Michael said nothing. He moved automatically and was silent. Then his nose began
to bleed. It was a while before the bleeding stopped.
Danny spent the night in a nearby room. In the early morning Michael’s parents were called. They came and sat awhile with Michael, who was awake but seemed dazed and would say nothing to them about the night. It was Shabbat, and Danny and the Gordons would not travel back to their houses, so they spent the day at the treatment center. Dr. Altman called, and a staff member relayed his message to Danny: an evaluation meeting was to be scheduled for nine o’clock Monday morning. Abraham Gordon was gray-faced with apprehension. Ruth Gordon somehow managed to convey an appearance of exterior calm. But once during the day she went off by herself and was gone a long time. When she returned, her eyes were red.
The story came out slowly during the afternoon hours the three of them spent with Michael. He had conceived the idea soon after his therapy session with Danny on Friday morning. He had spent the afternoon convincing the four boys to join him. He had especially wanted Jonathan. No, he did not understand why he had wanted Jonathan. He had felt he needed him. What had he expected to do once they were outside with the knives? He didn’t know. He had just wanted to do something. Then he said he was tired, he wanted to sleep. They came out of his room and went downstairs.
It was Ruth Gordon who suggested that the family meet that night. And it was Abraham Gordon who requested that Danny call and ask me to join them.
They lived on the street floor of a five-story prewar apartment house two blocks from the Zechariah Frankel Seminary. There was a fenced-in lawn in front and plush chairs and gilt-edged mirrors in the lobby. We came through the lobby and climbed three marble steps and went down a carpeted hall. The nameplate on the door said, simply, Gordon. They were all waiting for us.
It was a solemn meeting, utterly unlike the last time I had seen them together when they had talked of the cab drivers of Naples and the back alleys of Rome and the rooted, aristocratic loveliness of Cambridge and Abraham Gordon’s airsickness over the Alps and Molly Bloom recumbent and big with seed. I had not seen Rachel since the end of October, and her parents since they had left the resort area. Joseph and Sarah Gordon had not changed at all. But Rachel had let her auburn hair grow very long and there was a radiance in her face that made my heart turn over when I first saw her that night—and there was a sadness there too, a deep brooding sadness over Michael. She loved Danny. You only had to look at her as she gazed at him or listened to him talk to know how deeply she loved him. And Danny talked a long time that night. For they had all agreed within the first five minutes of their meeting that Danny’s experiment was the only possibility left to them; but they wanted to hear again, and in very careful detail now, the manner in which the experiment would be conducted.
Danny spoke for almost an hour, describing the experiment and answering their questions. We sat in their living room, a large, handsomely furnished room—Persian rugs on the floor, odd little pieces of modernistic sculpture in the corners, a Steinway piano near the heavily draped front windows—we sat in that room and Danny talked. Rachel shared the sofa with her aunt and uncle. Danny sat closest to the fireplace, leaning forward, speaking softly, intently, his faintly nasal voice filling the large room.
On the ground floor of the treatment center, directly below the foyer, there was a small room which was now being used for storage. It had been a maid’s room once when the building had been privately owned. It was about the same size as the foyer, perhaps a little smaller. The room had electricity and a small window set high in the wall facing the front of the house—high enough so that someone Michael’s size would be unable to see through it. They would clean out the room and have it repainted. They would make certain it was properly ventilated and heated. A mattress would be brought into the room and placed on the floor. Then Michael would be taken into the room and left there alone with the door locked. He would be given nothing to read or see or hear. If sounds filtered through the window from outside, the window would have to be sealed or even boarded up. Michael would have nothing to focus on, except the silence and the loneliness and the bare walls. He would be fed regularly by staff people. He would be seen regularly by Danny. He would be checked regularly by a pediatrician. No one except Danny would be able to speak to him. How would he get to a bathroom? Joseph Gordon wanted to know. There was a bathroom with a toilet, sink, and shower directly across a small hallway from the room. He would be taken there regularly by staff people. The idea was, quite simply and honestly, to break Michael down so that he would want to talk to Danny, to make him so sick as a result of this radical therapy that he would want to undergo normal therapy.
Danny went into considerable technical detail about how he planned to organize the staff for this experiment: schedules, flexibility, contingency plans in case this or that occurred, the nature of his therapy sessions with Michael, what they would do in case Michael stopped eating, how they would handle possible hysteria, what their plans were in case he tried hurting himself in some way. Yes, Danny said in response to a question from Joseph Gordon. The chances were good that it would work.
Near the end of that hour, Ruth Gordon turned to me and said I had been so very quiet all night, what did I think, did I have any questions I wanted to ask Danny. I had a million questions, I said. It all seemed very strange to me, and I was sure it was a lot more technical and involved than Danny had indicated. But even if Danny gave us all the technical terms and the psychological theories that were part of this, would that really help us understand what this would do to Michael. The important thing was that I trusted Danny, I said. That was more important than anything else. I knew Danny for years, I said very quietly. We had grown up together. And I trusted him.
I had apparently given expression to their own deepest feelings. There were no more questions. Danny could go to the evaluation meeting on Monday morning and inform Dr. Altman that the Gordons favored going ahead with the experiment. Abraham and Ruth Gordon had canceled their sudden trip and would be home all week in case they were needed.
“If’s a hell of a thing,” Joseph Gordon said to me a little later, chewing on his pipe. The seven of us were sitting or standing around the room, talking quietly. “This is going to kill my brother if it doesn’t work. He would have quit writing that new book if it weren’t for Ruth pushing him to finish it. It’s a hell of a thing.” He gazed across the room at the couch where Danny and Rachel were sitting alone and talking. “That’s quite a young man,” he said, smiling faintly around the pipe. “Who would have figured Rachel falling in love with the son of a Hasidic rebbe? Rachel. My crazy, beautiful, sophisticated Rachel … Go figure it,” he said. Then he said, “We’re meeting his parents next week.”
I did not say anything.
“Go figure it,” he said again in a tone of wonder and walked away, shaking his head.
I stood there, looking at Danny and Rachel. They were sitting close to each other, not quite touching, and Danny was saying something and Rachel was leaning toward him, and I had the impression they were sealed off in a world of their own and had been talking only to themselves for all their lives. I looked at them and felt a rancid darkness inside me—and I turned my head away.
Sarah Gordon came over to me, looking handsome and slender—a lovely middle-aged version of Rachel. I ought to go into the marriage-broker business, she said. Then she said, seriously, “Tell me about Danny’s parents. What are they like?” I told her Danny’s mother was a gentle, sickly woman and Danny’s father was—well, Danny’s father was an experience. But the fact that he had consented to meet with them was a very good sign, I said. I thought there would be trouble over a Gordon-Saunders alliance, I said. She grimaced. There had been trouble, she said. There had been a great deal of trouble. Rachel had made some—compromises. I looked at her. No, Rachel would not cut off her hair and wear a Hasidic-style wig, she said. On that point Rachel had been adamant. But there were other things … I nodded and we let it go at that.
Danny was talking quietly with Abraham and Ruth Gordo
n, and Rachel was alone on the couch. I went over to her and sat down.
“It is as obvious as an Aristotelian syllogism that you have a slight crush on my good friend Daniel,” I told her.
She smiled radiantly.
“It’s good to see you again,” I said. “It’s good to see you like this.”
She thanked me.
“Tell me something, my lover of county fairs and James Joyce. Why did you pick the Ithaca section of Ulysses to do a paper on?”
She looked at me curiously.
“Was there a special reason?”
“No,” she murmured.
“I reread it today. No special reason?”
“No.” There was a faint pink flush on her cheeks.
“Danny is contagious,” I said with a smile. “Or am I reading something into it that isn’t really there?”
She said nothing. But her eyes were moist.
“I’m very happy for you,” I said quietly. “I really am. I mean that, Rachel.”
She leaned forward and right there with everyone in the room kissed my cheek.
“Aha!” Danny said, grinning, as he came over to us and sat down on the other side of Rachel. “My friend. My best friend. I turn my back and suddenly my best friend reminds me I’m in the twentieth century.”
“I’m practicing for the wedding.”
“That’s not the kind of wedding it’s going to be, best friend.”
“A Hasidic wedding,” I said in a tone of mock despair. “I will have to dust off my caftan and fur-trimmed cap.”
Danny and Rachel laughed.
“I will have to dust off my caftan and practice some dances and songs. It’s been a long time.”
“Yes,” Danny said, suddenly serious. “For you. But it’s my world, best friend. And I haven’t seen anything outside that’s better.”
“Nothing?” I said.
