There came a knock on the door. “Father?” queried a woman’s voice.
“I’m not here,” he groaned.
“Father, it’s time for your dental appointment.”
“What?”
The door opened, and the nurse walked in. “Father, remember, I told you this morning: you have to be at the dentist’s office by two o’clock. Now, let’s get up and go.”
“Well,” he exhaled, completely puzzled, “I wish I’d known.”
The nurse rolled her eyes and took his hat and overcoat from the closet. She said they’d be back in an hour or so, and that I could wait for him if I wanted.
“I’m very sorry about this,” he offered. “I really had no idea.”
“That’s okay.” I smiled. “I’ll read your book while you’re gone.”
“You have my book? What? Did you bring it with you? How did you find it?”
“You gave me a copy, remember?”
“I gave you a copy of my book?”
There it was, on the desk, next to him. He opened the front cover and saw that he’d half-inscribed it to me: To Adam, surely one of the finest—he had no recollection of starting to dedicate it, but he picked up another pen and continued—of my best . . .!?! Come back and I’ll try to give you something else.
* * *
In the parking lot, an elderly Jesuit in a wheelchair rolled up and said something in French to Father Gervais, who responded with a Quebecois witticism. The man turned to me, disregarding what he called Gervais’s “nimble but ineffective patois.” He proffered his hand, introducing himself as an atmospheric scientist. “I specialize in fog,” he added.
“He also specializes in hot air,” Gervais added, opening up the passenger-side door of a car. “And in giving people the cold shoulder. Speaking of which, I must be off.”
The fog specialist and I watched Gervais drive off the property. “So what sort of fog do you specialize in?” I asked.
“The upward-moving fogs,” the man answered, slowly gliding a trembling hand toward my head. “And the downward-rolling fogs.” The hand wobbled back down.
He looked at me quizzically, as though speaking in a parable about life’s peaks and valleys, about revelations greater than the interaction of rising and descending currents, perhaps about death and resurrection or the mysteries of kathodos and anodos.
“Are there any other types of fog?” I pressed, just to see.
“Those two are the ones I observe the most,” the old Jesuit said, quixotically. “But there are other fogs, higher in the atmosphere. Have you ever encountered them?”
* * *
Thinking of how Gervais had found God while going for walks in the countryside, I set off into the woods behind the infirmary. A diffuse sun dripped through the branches. Blue jays chirped. Rusty leaves dusted with snow blanketed the forest floor.
A path between the trees brought me to a creek. Two supine branches dangling languidly across each other seemed to be saying something about love and death. The water trickled into mud and disappeared. I kept going. A blur of black fur scampered through felled birch trees.
I came upon a clearing, a white glade whose sparseness was broken only by the columnlike trunks of ancient, dark trees, perfect in their stillness. All was calm. It felt as if I’d stumbled upon an abandoned cloister. I could see why they considered this hallowed ground. The treetops, spinning in their silent vortex, seemed to extend beyond thought. I wondered if I could ever be a believer. Could I make that leap? If so, what would I even believe in?
* * *
When Father Gervais returned from his dental appointment, we reconvened in his room. It was nearly suppertime and neither of us felt up for more theological talk, so we made plans to meet again soon. I asked him who else came for visits. “The occasional young Jesuit, like yourself,” he answered. “My brother, my sister. Now and then Sharry comes by.”
He pointed at a photograph on the wall, a headshot of the theater actress Sharry Flett. “We got to know one another when I directed her in Hamlet,” he recalled. “The critics said she was the best Ophelia they’d ever seen.” He’d also been the officiating priest at her wedding. He used to stay at her home in Niagara during the theater season, he added. They would drink wine and have debates long into the night regarding the meaning of the life force. Perhaps she could help clarify it for me?
When I called her to find out, Sharry graciously suggested that the three of us meet up for a life-force symposium.
* * *
Sharry Flett and I met outside the infirmary some months later. Petite, she appeared delicate, almost porcelain, an impression immediately dispelled by her resonant, centered voice. Like all great actors, she exuded as much vulnerability as strength. Her pale skin and brushstrokes of shoulder-length, platinum hair were thrown into high relief by an elegant black outfit. She must have been over fifty, but she gave off a versatile agelessness.
We joined Father Gervais in the chapel just as morning mass was about to begin. He couldn’t make sense of our being there together. “Sharry!” he cried, delighted. “But how do you know Adam? It is Adam, isn’t it? And how do you know Sharry? I know both of you, I think, but I can’t figure out how you two know each other? I’m confused.”
“That’s a good thing.” Sharry laughed, hugging him.
The liturgy began. Beneath a stained-glass backdrop of green shoots bursting from a sea of flame, the priest spoke about living forever and ever. We ate Christ’s transubstantiated body and drank his blood. When it came time to offer our neighbors a sign of peace, Gervais popped up spryly from his chair, straightened his jacket and tie, and then shook hands with Sharry, me, and five or six priests in our vicinity.
After service, the three of us went to lunch at a waterside restaurant nearby. As soon as we’d ordered, Sharry asked Gervais about the meaning of the word mystery.
He looked at both of us. “Mystery, eh?” He cleared his throat. “For me it has always been the center.” He told his story about being a young boy looking up at the stars at night. In this version, he was lying on his back in a field.
“And was that mystery to you?” Sharry asked. “Even at that young age?”
“Yes.” He nodded. “It was also God. The infinite. You know.”
“Was it the life force?”
“Perhaps.”
“Well?”
“What?” he asked, looking from her to me.
Her posture was resolute. “Can we speak about the life force?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, a little slyly. “We can try.”
“But what does it mean for you?” she said, trying to get him to explain.
He laughed and shook his head. They both had blue-gray eyes, and despite their age disparity, they could have been siblings. “This little creature here—” He put his hand on her shoulder, turning to me as a means of deflecting the topic.
“Let’s stay on track.” She held fast.
“I’m going to let you guess what the life force is,” he taunted, dancing around the question like a leprechaun. I wondered if he was thinking of Ignatius’s dictum to not speak unduly about grace.
She crossed her arms and looked at him insistently.
“Think of it this way,” he offered. “When someone dies, it’s not just their entire existence that’s snuffed out. There is some life force still out there. It goes on. There’s a statement of faith there. . . .”
“So the life force is like the soul?” Sharry asked.
“Not exactly. We can’t define it. I know, it’s confusing.”
“You just can’t be linear, can you?” Sharry threw her hands up. “Everything is circles with you: circles upon circles.”
“Circles are wonderful!” he retorted. “You don’t think circles are linear?” He started speaking about the benign cycle of life, a vortex spiraling downward and upward, expanding and constricting, filled with inward vitality. Sharry said he was making her head go around in circles.
&nbs
p; “That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” he asked. “There’s clarity in the confusion. As a Jesuit, you have that. There are fathoms upon fathoms.”
“You’re able to think in spirals, but how do the rest of us find clarity?”
“In the confusion. Confusion is how we balance irreconcilable unresolvables. There’s no other way. And faith allows us to accept our uncertainty.”
“Whenever we talk about this stuff, it always dissolves into an inability to attain any sort of resolution.”
“But resolution isn’t . . .” He paused, out of sorts. “What are we talking about again?”
“The life force,” she said, and we both looked at him expectantly.
“Oh, yes. You two!” He put his head in his hands and laughed silently. “What you’re asking for is impossible. There’s no final statement capable of affirming the full ambivalence and meaningfulness of all life. Trying to find it is an infinite quest. A relentless search.”
Gervais made a sweeping gesture with his arms, knocking over a glass, which he somehow caught before it fell to the ground.
“Instinct!” I gasped.
“Practice,” he corrected, sharp as ever. “You know, I was going to say I had this same conversation with Bergman many times.”
“What did he think of the life force?”
Gervais characterized Bergman’s best films as being stories about the life force. He brought up a scene in Through a Glass Darkly where the family loses their daughter to mental illness. The father consoles his son by telling him to focus on the fact that love exists as something real in the world of men. This love, the father says, is actually God. “So love is the proof?” asks the son. The father answers, “We can’t know whether love proves God’s existence or whether love is itself God. After all, it doesn’t make very much difference.” God and love are the same thing.
It reminded me of a friend’s wedding several days earlier. I recounted how the pastor had described seeing God in the love between the bride and groom.
“He saw God when he looked at the two of them in love?” Sharry asked, starting to cry, softly, unexpectedly. “That’s what God is?”
We both looked at Father Gervais. He sat in silence for a moment as she wiped the tears from her eyes with the corner of a napkin.
“So if we could achieve God in love,” she pressed on, “or love in God, then there wouldn’t be any more war, would there?”
“I don’t know about that,” Gervais said, kindly. “There’ve been a lot of crusades fought in the name of love.”
There it was, even on the cusp of some breakthrough, that lack of resolution, again, always.
“Is love the same thing as the life force?” I asked.
“Not exactly. You feel the life force in love. Love is a very strong thing, very powerful. You know, when Jesus rose, he spoke a lot about love—about how love is all we have, all there is, all that’s there, so love one another and all that. To feel love is to feel something greater than yourself. To have loved is to believe. One understands when one loves.”
“And this all plays into the life force?” Sharry asked.
Gervais looked at me, as though he’d done everything he could to adhere to Ignatius’s precepts. “I can’t tell you,” he said, “but I can show you.” He leaned in and gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
He turned back to me and, pointing at Sharry, said, “Have you met my aunt?”
We laughed. But even though he was joking, he was also crying.
“Look at the eyes in my tears,” he managed, blue eyes limpid and liquid.
“‘Look at the eyes in my tears,’” Sharry repeated, seeming to understand for a moment. “That’s it. Love—tears, fountains, rain.”
“The life force,” he said.
“That’s it.” Sharry nodded. “A feeling.”
“The feeling remains,” he offered.
* * *
After lunch, we ended up at a picnic table on the edge of a ravine near the infirmary. The forest spread out before us, standing sentinel in its autumnal robe.
As Sharry and I went to sit next to each other, Father Gervais looked at me in an effort to ascertain what I was doing there. “Where are you stationed?” he asked, confusing me again for a young Jesuit.
“I’m actually a writer. One of your former pupils.”
“You mean you’re not here doing your novitiate?”
“No, I’m just a heathen,” I half-joked.
“You don’t mean that!”
“Really, I’m a pagan.”
“No! In what way?”
“I love all religions, but I don’t practice any of them. Belief systems are great, as long as they aren’t hurting anybody. I believe in mythologies without having faith. I’m fascinated with religion, but I’m not attached to any one faith. Isn’t that paganism? Maybe it’s polytheism, or pantheism. I just like stories that remind us of the power of the elements—”
As I spoke, he went to sit down opposite us, and we all heard a groaning, creaking sound. The wooden bench had rotted, and he started falling through its bowed, worn-out, splintering beams. Before either Sharry or I could move, the final connecting fibers gave way, depositing him on the ground, where he landed in a bed of leaves. We both jumped over to help him as he lay there, looking up at the sky, laughing.
* * *
Father Gervais died that winter. His funeral ceremony took place at the Saint Ignatius parish, adjacent to the Loyola campus. A quote from an Ignatian prayer adorned the program: “Give me only your love and your grace. That is enough for me.”
When his coffin was brought in by family members, priests in ankle-length white robes and creamy scarves clustered up against it, seemingly excited to be close to someone going where they wanted to go. They huddled together like white petals around the stamen of his body. During the memorial mass, the father described him as a steward of the Lord’s mysteries on earth.
The reception afterward was attended by many filmmakers, artists, publishers, and media types. I hung around for a few minutes and then slipped out. I entered the old chapel Gervais used as a theater for screening films. Inside the foyer, I found some of his film posters still tacked to the wall. On the main floor, noontime mass was under way, with nine or ten people in attendance. The priest lifted a chalice to his lips. His words echoed into the sunlight: “For ever and ever.”
6
Beneath the Gaze of Eternity
A rabbi would never exaggerate. A rabbi composes. He creates thoughts. He tells stories that may never have happened. But he does not exaggerate.
—Rabbi Krustofsky, The Simpsons
I didn’t know! I was more Hasidic Jew than I thought.
—Oprah Winfrey, in conversation with Rabbi Motti Seligson
THE NEIGHBORHOOD I live in is primarily Hasidic. My male neighbors wear long, dark robes and imposing circular fur hats. They look majestic in the snow, like eighteenth-century Ukrainians who’ve landed on Pluto. Seen from the back, they’re head-to-toe black, lines redacted from contemporary life. Some denominations demarcate themselves by tucking their pants into knee-high white stockings. Others have wider-brimmed hats or extrashiny coats or tassels that drag along the ground. All the young men are often in a hurry, run-walking wherever they’re off to, busy as ants. In line at the bank, they read the Torah while twisting their payos and swaying from side to side. My rare conversations with them always prove insightful. They’re smart, funny, wry. They pace the streets at night, lost in contemplation, either calm or wound so tight they seem to be sparking.
In their world, God comes before everything. They live lives centered around family and tradition. For the most part, they don’t fraternize with others and can affect a frosty, standoffish demeanor. But so would anyone adhering to such an unmodern mode of being.
In recent years, the local borough council has prevented new synagogues from being built for their expanding population. As a result, covert temples are everywhere—in my back alley, a
t the end of the block, across the street. The men cluster around unmarked doors leading to subterranean congregations. Sometimes in summer, the windows open and passersby can glimpse Hasidim praying, eyes closed, moving intensely. Their singing is beauteous: ancient, Eastern melodies pouring from the hearts of whiskered men.
Most of the Hasidic businesses in the neighborhood prefer not to cater to outsiders. Their grocery stores, full of kosher salt and kosher yogurt and kosher meats, stock totally different soft drinks (Mayim Chaim Cola), snacks (Lieber’s Onion and Garlic Chips), and sweets (Osem’s Cookies & Dreams). Hasidic fishmongers and butchers stoically tolerate—rather than welcome—outside customers’ presence. Most shops are signless. Some cover their windows with brown paper. Others stack their storefronts high with aluminum containers.
One of the few businesses fully welcoming Orthodox shoppers and gentiles alike is around the corner from my apartment. Cheskie’s Bakery bills itself as heimishe—a Yiddish expression meaning homemade, hospitable, and friendly. They specialize in Hungarian-style pastries (cheese crowns and babka), as well as New York–style classics such as poppy-seed rugelach and black-and-white cookies. The owner is Cheskie Lebowitz, a good-natured, kind-eyed baker who moved here from Brooklyn to live with his wife, a Montrealer.
I’m always happy to bump into him. We commiserate about our Hungarian fathers. When I need a ladder, Cheskie lends me his. He tells me about his passion for auto maintenance. When informed of my carlessness, he arranged for one of his bakers to rent out my parking spot. We’re neighbors—good ones—but he sometimes balks at my curiosity.
A few years earlier, I’d read something about the Hasidic belief that God is in all things. The idea resonated, and I’d inquired with Cheskie. Naïvely, I suppose I expected him to talk about God’s being in the window display for his pastries, in the pastry cream itself, in the flour-dusted apron he always wears. Instead, he crisped up. “I can’t speak on such matters,” he answered, looking around nervously. “Listen, I just make dough and go to synagogue.” But if I really wanted, he allowed, he could put me in touch with an authority. Having apparently crossed a boundary, I didn’t pursue it then—but this time, when I walked in and saw Cheskie taking orders for marble cake and rye bread, I thought of Auntie Tiny and the fountain. As much as I’d learned with Father Gervais and the Sufis, surely Hasidim must have some Old Testament insights?
Book of Immortality Page 10
