City of God

by E. L. Doctorow

  The man sat. A long silence. The rabbi cleared her throat. “I think, now, perhaps it’s time for the Kaddish?”

  —“Everett, who was that!”

  “It has to be Seligman. Bigger, heavier, and he combs his hair now. But it’s Seligman, all right. Christ. Am I glad he didn’t see me.”

  “Why? What’s the matter with him?”

  “Seligman was a shlub, he landed on people. Never had enough lunch money. Never paid attention in class. I had to tell him the plot of Macbeth.”

  “When was this?”

  “At Science. He’d plop down next to me in study hall to copy my algebra homework.”

  “Where?”

  “Bronx Science. That was my high school. The Bronx High School of Science.”

  “Wait a minute.. . . you don’t mean Murray Seligman!”

  “He never tied his shoelaces. His teeth were green.”

  “The Murray Seligman—the Nobelist in physics?”

  “That too.”

  Pem peering into my eyes. A smile, slowly widening. “My oh my. . .”

  “What, my oh my?”

  “Who told him about the EJ? He just walk in?”

  “How should I know? Ask Sarah.”

  “She probably won’t know either. It doesn’t matter anyway.”

  He leans across the table, puts his hand on the back of my neck, and kisses me on the forehead. “Ways of God. You’ll just have to take my word for it. This is the Divinity Detective you’re talking to.”

  “Pem—”

  “What happened this evening was signal.”

  “Oh right. Murray the jerk who nearly blew up the chem lab. He was such a slob they wouldn’t let him do the experiments. Don’t give me that!”

  “Give you what? What am I giving you? I’m not attributing anything to the slob. I’m attributing to the occasion. I’ll tell you something, Everett. As a secularist, you don’t understand—if there is a religious agency in our lives, it has to appear in the manner of our times. Not from on high, but a revelation that hides itself in our culture, it will be ground-level, on the street, it’ll be coming down the avenue in the traffic, hard to tell apart from anything else. It will be cryptic, discerned over time, piecemeal, to be communally understood at the end like a law of science.”

  “Yeah, they’ll put it on a silicon chip.”

  “For shame! These are democratic times, Everett. We’re living in a postmodern democracy. You think God doesn’t know that?”

  “I need a drink.”

  “Waiter, another round!. . . What are you so upset about?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re upset because you’re implicated.”

  “Give me a break.”

  Pem begins to laugh, a great chesty, robust baritone laugh. “You’re upset because it’s coming through you! As the cross arriving on the roof of the synagogue, as I have fallen in love with Sarah Blumenthal, as the great Nobel Prize–winning physicist who showed up this evening is the jerk who copied your homework at Bronx Science. . . and as you have erroneously, gloriously assumed you could write a book about it!”

  —Sarah Blumenthal’s Address to the Conference of American Studies in Religion, Washington, D.C.

  In the twentieth century about to end, the great civilizer on earth seems to have been doubt. Doubt, the constantly debated and flexible inner condition of theological uncertainty, the wish to believe in balance with rueful or nervous or grieving skepticism, seems to have held people in thrall to ethical behavior, while the true believers, of whatever stamp, religious or religious-statist, have done the murdering. The impulse to excommunicate, to satanize, to eradicate, to ethnically cleanse, is a religious impulse. In the practice and politics of religion, God has always been a license to kill. But to hold in abeyance and irresolution any firm convictions of God, or of an afterlife with Him, warrants walking in His spirit, somehow. And among the doctrinaire religious, I find I trust those who gravitate toward symbolic comfort rather than those who reaffirm historic guarantees. It is just those uneasy promulgators of traditional established religion who are not in lockstep with its customs and practices, or who are chafing under doctrinal pronouncements, or losing their congregations to charismatics and stadium-filling conversion performers, who are the professional religious I trust. The faithful who read Scripture in the way Coleridge defined the act of reading poetry or fiction, i.e., with a “willing suspension of disbelief.”

  Yet they must be true to themselves and understand theirs is a compromised faith. Something more is required of them. Something more. . .

  I ask the question: Is it possible that the behavioral commandments of religion, its precipitate ethics or positive social values, can be maintained without reference to the authority of God? In my undergraduate seminar in metaphysics at Harvard, the professor said there can be no ought, no categorical imperative in Kantian terms, no action from an irresistible conscience, without a supreme authority. But that does not quite address the point. I ask if after the exclusionary, the sacramental, the ritualistic, and simply fantastic elements of religion are abandoned, can a universalist ethics be maintained—in its numi-nousness ? To a certain extent, in advanced industrial democracies, such behavior is already codified with reference to no higher authority than civil law. If our Constitution not only separated church and state but adapted as the basis of civil law something of the best essence of the Judeo-Christian ethical system, was there not only a separation but an appropriation, which largely goes unremarked by our more passionate preachers?

  Suppose then that in the context of a hallowed secularism, the idea of God could be recognized as Something Evolving, as civilization has evolved—that God can be redefined, and recast, as the human race trains itself to a greater degree of metaphysical and scientific sophistication. With the understanding, in other words, that human history does show a pattern at least of progressively sophisticated metaphors. So that we pursue a teleology thus far that, in the universe as vast as the perceivable cosmos, and as infinitesimal as a subatomic particle, has given us only the one substantive indication of itself—that we, as human beings, live in moral consequence.

  In this view the supreme authority is not God, who is sacramental-ized, prayed to, pleaded with, portrayed, textualized, or given voice, choir, or temple walls, but God who is imperceptible, ineffable, except. . . for our evolved moral sense of ourselves.

  Constitutional scholars are accustomed to speak of the American civil religion. But perhaps two hundred or so years ago something happened, in terms not of national history but of human history, that has yet to be realized. To understand what that is may be the task of the moment for our theologians. But it involves the expansion of ethical obligation democratically to be directed all three hundred and sixty degrees around, not just upon one’s co-religionists, a daily indiscriminate and matter-of-fact reverence of human rights unself-conscious as a handshake. Dare we hope the theologians might emancipate themselves, so as to articulate or perceive another possibility for us in our quest for the sacred? Not just a new chapter but a new story?

  There may not be much time. If the demographers are right, ten billion people will inhabit the earth by the middle of the coming century. Huge megacities of people all over the planet fighting for its resources. And perhaps with only the time-tested politics of God on their side to see them through. Under those circumstances, the prayers of mankind will sound to heaven as shrieks. And such abuses, shocks, to our hope for what life can be, as to make the twentieth century a paradise lost.

  Thank you.

  —Songbirds: Skylark. . . Red Red Robin. . . Bluebird of Happiness. . .

  —Of course movies today no longer require film. They are recorded and held in digital suspension as ones and zeroes. And so at the moment the last remaining piece of the world is lit and shot for a movie, there will be another Big Bang. . . and the multitudes of ones and zeroes will be strewn through the universe as particles that act like waves. . . until,
shaken by borealic winds or ignited by solar flares or otherwise galvanized by this or that heavenly signal, they compose themselves into brilliant constellations that shine in full color across the night sky of a remote planet. . . where a reverent, unrecognizable form of life will look up from its rooftops at the faces of Randolph Scott, Gail Russell, George Brent, Linda Darnell. . . to name just a few of the stars.

  —I anticipate not being invited to the wedding. From remarks Pem has made, I think it will be a simple five-minute event down at city hall. Flowers from the peddler at the curb. Echoing catacomb-like corridors of marble. ID and marriage license in one hand, divorce papers in the other. Ministry of the Civil Service: windowless room with stained-glass insets.

  They used to do this feature regularly in the papers, lovers forging their fate with civic blessing. Picture of the line of couples and their chosen witnesses, handsome West Indians, scared and pale eighteen-year-olds from Queens, sturdy young Latinos in tropical colors, stylish, lots of laughter, ready to break out dancing, a quiet older couple holding hands. Pem and Sarah. This is their principled decision—the municipal sacrament.

  Maybe Seligman will be their witness.

  Now I am thinking of the marriage night. It is unpleasant imagining any two people you know making love, but I have no trouble here, this is such a pure thing, such plighted troth, there is nothing porno-graphic about it, Pem lowers his clumsy adoring being on Sarah, her hands wander over his back like the learning fingers of a sightless person, he is practically weeping for joy, he tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear just the way she does when she’s bent over the Torah, he touches her mouth, and when they kiss there is nothing at work in his mind, no running commentary, the indissoluble self is dissolved. I say it is dark, it is late, the boys are asleep on the floor below, but the dimmest light from the street seems to gravitate to her eyes which shine dark as plums. I can’t imagine what it is like for her, but as she guides him, holds him, he sinks into total recognition, as if they have always made love, as if they have been man and wife for a practiced time. There is no sense of discovery, of a new knowledge, and whatever her particularities of flesh and bone, they are transformed instantly into the only shape and structure that it is possible for a woman to have. . .

  Pem hasn’t completed his conversion studies, but I don’t think they will wait to marry, Sarah in her progressivism coming out to meet him halfway, as it were. He said to me last night that he has never felt as completely, wholly Christian in his life as he does now, studying to be a Jew.

  Pem, I told him, maybe you better not say that to anyone else.

  Why? It’s true.

  Are you sure you’ve got the right perspective on this?

  Well, I admit, part of my thinking is in the nature of making spiritual reparations, so to speak. Maybe that’s where it began. But it’s more than that now. I feel liberated, restored to my mind, my intellect is being admitted into my faith. Everything is coming together, it’s all so logical. I have never felt as honest, as without misgivings in my belief in the Creator. It is unattached to mythology. It is nonpictorial. Admittedly there’s a lot of pseudohistorical clutter in Judaism too, but that’s what Sarah and Joshua founded EJ for, to get back to the crucial first things. And that’s what we will do. For me, now, Judaism is Christianity without Christ, and I have a glad heart.

  A glad heart. I like that.

  It’s more than a fucking phrase, Everett. It’s a real feeling-state.

  Okay.

  Migod, there is something about the secular disdain that is really awful.

  I don’t have the secular disdain.

  You would do better with a glad heart than the secular disdain.

  I do all right. I like birds, I like women, I like language. These foolish things gladden the heart.

  Do you know, Everett, what the anthropic principle is? It is quite simple: that our universe, having exploded into existence at an inflationary rate, and spent billions of years swathed in an opacity of gases before photons brought light into space and everything cooled—

  Wait a minute, what are we on to now?

  Seligman told me this—after photons lit things up enough to create the furnaces of stars in their galaxies and stellar dust and dark matter. . . well, from all this perturbation just those elements were created that allowed for the appearance of human life. That is the anthropic principle. Whatever the universe is composed of seems to have made us possible.

  Seligman told you that?

  It’s an idea kicking around among the cosmologists.

  Is that the best they can come up with? The self-evident anthropic principle?

  Well why it’s useful to them, it smooths out some of their problems. They are in less of a bind if it turns out that there are other universes besides this one that may not have the necessary components for human consciousness.

  Like what?

  Like hydrogen and carbon and space and time and such.

  I see.

  But ours has these things that allow us to be having this conversation. I’m telling you just so you know there are some secularists who do not have the secular disdain.

  —A little thought experiment: If we were to build a rocket ship and send it off into space, and this rocket ship were equipped to feel like home, with roads and houses, lawn chairs, VCRs, Kmarts, football fields, and wars. . . the space traveler, upon awakening, would not be able to tell if he was on earth in the usual orbit or drifting forever, irrevocably and without remediation, through the anthropic universe. You see how simple it is?

  —And so it’s done, they were married downtown in the middle of the week, and I was right in not expecting to be best man, there was no best man, there was a best woman, Joshua Gruen’s sister. I understand that, I understand why Sarah would make that choice, the thoughtful-ness of it, the acknowledgment, in the midst of her joy, of her loss, the loss to both of them. A large, meaningful choice enacting the impeccable ethics of Sarah.

  The sister’s name is Judy, she’s a psychiatric social worker, mid-thirties, small dark-haired woman wearing a corsage, trim little figure, quite nice, just a little tearful as we sit talking in the Senate Room of the Jefferson residential hotel on East Seventy-second Street on this Sunday afternoon.

  “I’m happy for Sarah,” Judy says. “She’s a wonderful person. She and my brother were a marriage made in heaven. But after everything she’s been through, she deserves some happiness. I think this is good for the kids, too.”

  Judy’s husband, Al Something, teaches English at some community college in New Jersey—he is not that convinced. Pepper-and-salt beard, which he strokes as he watches Pem, who at the moment is dancing and chatting away with an elderly white-haired lady.

  “I don’t believe in conversion,” Al says. “I don’t think it’s possible. What do you call a Christian Marrano?” he says to me.

  Around the small dance floor are several tables with white cloths at which the guests sit nibbling on the hot and cold hors d’oeuvres. A bar to one side, the bartender not overworked, it’s a sherry and soft-drink crowd. I go over, and when I ask for a double vodka on the rocks, his face lights up.

  Maybe fifty, sixty people, most of whom I don’t know, the extended relationships of Pem and Sarah. It will take me a while, but I will come to understand that on one side sit the Pems and on the other the Sarahs, not a combination conducive to partying, no horas on the dance floor, the combo plays dance music, slow-swinging, gentle—piano, sax, guitar, bass. They’re not bad. But in this crowd, when someone gets up to dance everyone watches.

  On these occasions it’s always a strain connecting the principals, your friends, to the relatives and friends from their past. Another world. You have the feeling that the wedding guests are just those people whom the bride and groom have spent their lives trying to escape. I am surprised on two counts, one that there is any wedding reception at all, and two that it is here at this stuffy hotel. But this is the residence of Sarah’s dowager aunt, t
he late mother’s older sister, Myrna Fein. Seeing her instruct one of the waiters, I understand this is her show.

  As I think about it, I don’t know how Sarah has been able to keep her establishment going. How much Joshua could have left her in insurance, whether there was money in his family, or if there’s a mortgage on their synagogue.. . . Money doesn’t seem to be a problem. I know Pem is broke, but I don’t have the feeling she is. Yet her father as a lifelong academic could never have been that well-heeled. And nursing homes are expensive. How can anyone write a proper novel without talking about money?

  Judy and her husband get up to dance. They greet Pem and Sarah, who are now together on the dance floor. The two couples fox-trot in a kind of open half-embrace as they talk. Pem gesticulates with his free hand. They all laugh, even sister Judy’s skeptical husband.

  Sarah is wearing an ivory suit with a bronze silk blouse that picks up the lights in her hair. Her hair is longer now and tied simply behind her neck, in the style of an American revolutionary. Her ears are unadorned. I see she is not wearing her specs for the occasion, for a moment she looks past the others straight at me, but I realize she is too nearsighted, too beautifully, radiantly nearsighted, to actually see me.

  And here is Myrna Fein, the hostess, bearing down on the guest who sits alone. Settles in the chair beside mine. A stout woman, a round pretty face, heavily made up. Huffs and puffs to catch her breath, staring at me all the while.