36 Arguments for the Existence of God

by Rebecca Goldstein

  She smiles and leans back again.

  “Oh, then, it’s something good.”

  “Yes, very good.”

  “I’d thought for a moment it was something bad.”

  “Bad? Why?”

  “Your voice sounded ominous.”

  “Ominous?”

  “Well, solemn. I thought maybe some long-lost love of yours had shown up on our doorstep.”

  “Well, that, too,” he says, and they both laugh.

  They’ve exited onto Storrow Drive now, and there’s Weeks Bridge rising up before them, and Cass says, “The first night you were gone, I couldn’t sleep, and I finally just went for a walk at four a.m., and I found myself on Weeks Bridge,” and he points right and her eyes follow where he’s pointing. “The river was frozen except where it flowed through the three arches. It looked as if a cathedral had been carved into the ice.”

  “Has it melted now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Too bad. It sounds sublime.”

  “That’s exactly the right word. That’s the word I had thought at the time. Sublime.”

  She smiles again, and they cross back over Larz Andersen Bridge and through Harvard Square, and Cass is contemplating how irresistible that drunken sense is that makes you feel that you and the world are in silent cahoots.

  “Was Fidley fierce?”

  “Pretty fierce.”

  “Yes, I imagine he’d be a tough antagonist.”

  “Before I even walked into the place, he was intimidating the poor Agnostic Chaplain of Harvard.”

  She opens her eyes.

  “Did you say the Agnostic Chaplain of Harvard?”

  “I did. It was the Agnostic Chaplaincy that sponsored the debate.”

  “How droll!”

  “Yes,” he says, laughing, “it is droll!”

  “I guess I’ll never understand the religious mind.”

  “What about the agnostic mind?”

  “No, not that one either.”

  They drive down Massachusetts Avenue and turn onto Upland Road, and he pulls into the driveway, and the light from the streetlamp falls lavishly on them both.

  “You look so tired I feel I should carry you in.”

  She smiles. “I feel so tired I might let you.”

  He gets her suitcase out of the backseat and shoulders her computer bag and her purse, and they go through their gate and up the porch stairs, and he unlocks the door, and they climb the narrow stairs to their first floor side by side.

  “Why don’t you sit down, and I’ll make you some tea?”

  “I ought to unpack first. I always unpack first thing when I get home.”

  “I’ll help you unpack later. You just sit and have some tea. Are you hungry?”

  “I ate dinner during the stopover in Dallas. What about you? Have you eaten?”

  “I guess I haven’t. I didn’t have time after the debate.”

  “Hungry?”

  “Not at all. We can both have some tea and some McVities Original Digestive Biscuits. Heath and Heather Night Time or Rather Jolly Earl Grey?”

  “I’ll have the Rather Jolly Passionfruit.” She smiles and angles her head coyly.

  “My girl,” he says, his voice a little hoarse with emotion.

  He puts the kettle on, and then gets her suitcase and trots it up to their bedroom. He knows how disciplined she is, so that the sight of it sitting there, unattended to, will spoil her fun. He comes back down, and she’s settled onto the couch, her shoes thrown off, and her long legs curled beneath her.

  “I feel quite decadent not unpacking straightaway, but I guess I can be a bad girl sometimes.”

  “Of course you can. Life’s a thrill!”

  She’s wearing one of her short skirts, this one tight and black with pinstripes, and a pearl-gray sweater, and her languor is luscious, and he wonders whether he should put off telling her his news, but he can’t wait any longer.

  He has the Harvard letter out on their dining-room table, and he walks over and picks it up and hands it to her without a word.

  She places it on her lap and tilts slightly downward to read it, the fluffy halo of her pale hair falling away to reveal the lotus stem of the back of her neck, and Cass, standing there above her, gazes lovingly down on it. He would bend and softly kiss it, but she hates to be disturbed while she reads, even if it’s just the ingredient list on a food product, and he restrains himself from placing his lips on the tender exposure of her sweet neck. She straightens her back and stands and hands the letter back to Cass.

  “How nice for you,” she says. Her voice sounds as if it has turned blue with cold, and the coldness has hardened her thin upper lip, and the sight of it, the transformation it casts over her face, brings an ungainly unreality into the room.

  She turns away, and as soon as she does, and he doesn’t see her face, he’s sure that he hasn’t seen what he thought he had seen. She’s heading toward the stairs to their second floor, and there’s a howling sound, a long thin note as if of pain, and he realizes it’s the teakettle boiling.

  “Wait a sec,” he says, and runs to the kitchen to take the kettle off and runs back to the living room, and she isn’t there. He starts heading up the stairs, but she hears his footsteps and calls down, “I’ll be down jolly soon,” so he turns around and heads back into the kitchen, and mechanically starts to make their tea.

  He figures that her obsessional discipline has overpowered her, her sense of order asserting its tyranny. She’s unpacking, and then she’ll be down.

  He arranges the biscuits on a plate and sets them out on the table with folded napkins, and he has strawberries, too, which he washes and hulls, and he scoops some of Lucinda’s Double Devon Cream into a bowl, and she still hasn’t come down from the bedroom.

  She’s put out, he understands that. Her voice gets British when she’s annoyed, and that “jolly soon” was, to use her word, ominous. He had made a terrible mistake in not telling her immediately about Harvard’s offer. His wiser self has known it all week long and made him feel guilty. She read the date on the letter, and she can see that it was posted a week ago, and it’s jarring to learn that your lover is capable of such expert dissembling. If he can hide this particular thing so well, who knows what else he can hide? Of course she’s upset, she has every right to be. But he’ll make it clear to her that he’s not the kind to keep secrets from her, and that he never will again, never. And he shouldn’t have told anyone else either, certainly not Roz, and he’ll confess to Lucinda that he did, and he’ll hope that she will forgive him.

  He wonders whether he ought to go up to her now. He knows that she’s hurt, and the longer she dwells on it without their talking, the more firmly the hurt will take hold. He knows this as a psychologist, and he knows this as a man. He moves toward the stairs and begins to climb them, heavily, so as to give her fair warning, and again she calls that she’ll be down soon and just to wait.

  The tea has gone cold, and he empties out the two cups in the sink. Lucinda likes her tea just short of scalding, and he puts the kettle up again, and steps out from the kitchen, and Lucinda is standing there in the living room. She’s holding the green leather suitcase in one hand, her briefcase and purse in another.

  “I thought you were unpacking,” he says stupidly.

  She takes a big breath and puts her things down and then says, “We have to talk,” and in those four words he knows it all.

  “This isn’t going to work,” she says.

  “Because of the way that I told you about the Harvard offer.”

  “That’s part of it. The insensitivity with which you just flung the offer in my face, not even waiting for me to unpack, with that terrible gloating on your face—well, it’s hard to take. I hadn’t realized how competitive you are.”

  Her intonation is so British that it’s hard to believe she grew up near Philadelphia.

  “Surely you can’t believe that. I’m not capable of feeling competitive with you.”

/>   “Well, if it wasn’t competitiveness, it was still insensitivity of monstrous proportions. Did you never stop to consider how it might make me feel, given my professional situation at the moment?”

  Her face has assumed a look of frigid hauteur that he’s never seen before, no matter how much contempt she’s displayed toward members of their department.

  “I had thought of the offer from Harvard as being something good for both of us.”

  “Well, that is, to put it generously, bizarre beyond belief. How could your professional success possibly be interpreted as benefiting me? Ah, wait. I think I see. I hadn’t pegged you as yet another man who just doesn’t get it, but I am incurably naïve that way. You can’t possibly appreciate what it is like for me, how hard I have had to struggle to be taken seriously. It’s never enough, no matter how much I do. And now you think I shall be content to bask in your reflected glory.”

  “That’s preposterous, your basking in my reflected glory. I would never dream of thinking that my work could even be compared to yours.”

  “And it can’t. I don’t mean to be hurtful, I’m not that kind of person, but you and I both know that this boon you’re enjoying has nothing to do with science. I know that the psychology of religion is topical, but it’s soft, and it’s shoddy, and if the world hadn’t suddenly gone mad on religion, no one would be lauding you like this. It’s deplorable that academia should prostitute itself, but there it is. Not even Harvard is above it. In fact, Harvard least of all, with that ludicrous delusion of self-importance that makes every Harvard professor feel he’s a public intellectual, qualified to comment on issues far beyond his expertise. You’ll do very well there.”

  Lucinda, holding herself ramrod-straight, walks over to the bay window overlooking the street and peers out, and then comes back to Cass.

  “I’m just watching for the cab. I’m spending the night at the Charles Hotel. I’ll get in touch with you about collecting my things.”

  “You don’t think there’s anything for us to talk over? Your mind is completely made up?”

  “This was only an experiment, as you know. I’d been explicit, from the very start. You can’t deny that.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Look, Cass, I wish you well. No matter what I might think about the injustices of academia, I have been trained to accept facts as facts. It was only rational of you to take advantage of the current interest in religion and to work the contemporary traumas to your self-interest. You’ve done well for yourself, and I’m happy for you. But I don’t respect what you do, and the fact that you have now acquired more prestige than I have, when my work is so much more important, is not something I can tolerate. I can’t degrade myself by being regarded as your female companion, the pretty young woman at the inferior institution who will be patronized by the Harvard elite. To be with you is to have everything that is wrong with academia constantly rubbed in my face.”

  She walks again to the bay window.

  “Ah, the taxi’s here.”

  Cass goes to pick up her suitcase.

  “I’ll take it myself.”

  “But you’re so tired. At least let me help you down.”

  “I’m not tired anymore. Goodbye, Cass. I’ll call you about my things.”

  She goes down the steps, and as he hears the front door close, he darkens the living room so that he can see her more clearly outside in the night.

  The driver emerges from the cab, taking her suitcase and her computer bag, and Cass can see her halo of pale hair catching the gleam of the streetlight as she turns back and carefully fastens the latch: “Please close the gate, remember our children.” The taxi drives off, and Cass hears a keening wail, the counterpart of the laughter that had risen like vapor off of his joy, only this, he thinks, is the sound of solemn sorrow, until he realizes it’s the kettle boiling.

  XXXVI

  The Argument from the Silent Rebbes Dance

  Cass drives into New Walden in the late afternoon of a wind-lashed day. The clouds are streaming across the sky, shadow and shimmer rippling over surfaces. It makes the ground look as if it’s in motion, as if it’s a carpet unfurling underfoot.

  There’s still more than an hour until the sun goes down, but the Valdeners are already out en masse, dressed in their Shabbes finery, the sartorial and tonsorial splendor of the men in full display. The winds coming off the Hudson are playfully pulling on payess and kaputas, and married women are laughing almost audibly as they hold on to their wigs and hats, their high spirits verging on disregard for the rules of female modesty.

  The Costco House of Worship, gargantuan as it is, has been outgrown, and there’s an additional warehouse of a synagogue constructed right behind it and the happy Hasidim are streaming in that direction. The streets are too clogged with walkers for Cass to drive on farther. He leaves his car not far from the parking lot where the mismatched buses are jammed, and continues on foot.

  Everyone Cass passes gives him a smile and a hearty mazel tov, and he answers in-kind. Mazel tov literally means “good luck” but is the phrase pronounced on someone to whom something fortunate has happened. You say mazel tov to a Bar Mitzvah boy and his family, to someone who gets engaged or gets married or has a baby. Mazel tov is the all-purpose response to all the good things, big and small.

  There are lots of out-of-towners visiting this Shabbes. Cass can tell by the garb of the men. It’s only the Valdeners who wear the knee-high black boots with their britches. Other sects wear long black stockings, with their black knickerbockers tucked in, and still others do the same only with white stockings, and still others let the bottoms of their pants extend over their socks. The Valdeners’ tradition of boots had derived from a compromise reached before a wedding, when the family of one side of the couple wore white stockings and the other side wore black.

  The styles of kaputas and shtreimlach differ, too. Cass is hardly an expert at the semiotics of the sects, but he’s pretty sure there are a lot of Satmars, Belzers, and Bobovers. Even the Gerers are represented. There used to be a rift between the Valdeners and the Gerers, but this has been mended in recent years through the masterful diplomacy of the Valdener Rebbe.

  The women and girls are less distinguishable. Cass thinks perhaps the other sects dress with a little more panache than the Valdeners, but this, too, takes a practiced eye, and when Cass is in New Walden he follows the mores and averts his eyes from females.

  Cass is on his way to his brother’s house. It was when Jesse was, as they say, away, that he had found religion, or religion had found him. He had been visited by the Hasidim—not Valdeners but Lubavitchers, who have an outreach program for Jewish prisoners—and eventually he made his way back to New Walden, where he goes by his Hebrew name, Yeshiya.

  Cass has to walk past the old Valdener synagogue to reach Jesse’s house, and the spectacle of masses of Hasidim converging as one has the convulsive effect on Cass it always does.

  The likeness in attire is partially responsible. Cass may be able to pick out the subtle differences in hosiery between a Valdener and a Satmar, but the overall effect is of an undifferentiated mass of humankind, a category mistake that writhes with a life of its own, and Cass is never indifferent to it, no matter how well he understands the psychology behind his reactions.

  The Friday-evening sun is descending behind those flitting clouds, and Cass is in a hurry to get to his brother’s house, but he pauses a moment in front of the Rebbe’s house to take in the scene, vibrating with kinetic men and boys rushing everywhere.

  A little boy, blond and beautiful, about the age that Azarya had been when Cass had first met him, skips past him and lisps out a mazel tov in a shy soprano. The child’s face is flushed, his cheeks pomegranates of excitement. If Cass were to stop him and ask him what he was feeling, what would he say?

  I’m happy, of course, he would say. I’m happy.

  And if the little boy were to ask what he, Cass Seltzer, the atheist with a soul, is feeling, standing
stock still in the middle of the commotion, what would he- say?

  He’d say what he’s been saying all along. That his Appendix was only an appendix, and that it has little to do with the text; and that the text is written not out there but in here, in the emotions that are so fundamental that we spread them onto a world of our imagining, or onto a world of our making, so that we end up beholding a world that is lavished with our own disgust at the uncleanliness that pollutes us, and with our yearning for a mythical purity that remains untouched, and with our vertiginous bafflement at the self that is inviolably me and here and now, and with our desperate and incomplete sense of the inviolable selves of the others that we need so crucially, and with our fear of all that’s unknown out there and that can hurt us, and with our suspicion that almost everything out there will turn out to be unknown and able to hurt us.

  The little boy has disappeared into the throng entering the synagogue. In Cass’s reverie, he’s still there, speaking in the voice of Azarya, peeking his head around a half-open door and shyly announcing that he can read English now, and in that voice he now asks him: and then what happens?

  This is what happens, Cass answers him. All of this. The rituals of purification; and the laws of separation, with menner on one seit and froyen on the other. The communities that define themselves in distinction from others, and the hatred in those others who can burn them alive. The young people clashing over sensuality and piety, and the dreams of our bodies or our souls outwitting death. The longings for redemption and for redeemers, and our imbuing others with the perfection that escapes us. The elected circle of disciples, and the ordeals that try their faith, and the sinner born again as a Hasid, a pious man. The signs and the portents of the coming of the Messiah, and the descent into madness of the false messiahs. The forces of our soul that press us outward and dissolve the boundaries of the self and burst us open onto the world, so that all of existence feels the way New Walden feels to a Valdener, an intimate world that will embrace us in coherence and connection and purpose and love, and whose caring is no more open to doubt than is the Valdener Rebbe’s love for his own Valdeners.