by Howard Fast
•
PART TWO
1948
•
His first death in Leighton Ridge, his first funeral. It was a withered little lady of seventy-nine years, the grandmother of Alan Buckingham’s wife, Dora. She had been a shy, silent creature. While Buckingham was one of the fourteen original organizers of the synagogue, he had never been active in synagogue affairs, and after the first few weeks of David’s tenure, he ceased to come to Friday night or Saturday morning services. His wife, Dora, however, rarely missed one or another of the weekend services, always bringing the old lady with her, and now and then her children: Jed, who was eight, and Jonathan, eleven. Dora was a tall, slender woman with bangs across a round face and deep, dark blue eyes. The Buckinghams lived in a lovely old Colonial house, which they had restored, and which Dora had furnished with such love and attention to detail that to David it felt more like a museum than a home. Alan Buckingham worked for a burgeoning national magazine with offices in New Haven.
When David and Lucy first met the Buckinghams, Lucy was of the opinion that Dora was not Jewish at all. “She doesn’t look Jewish,” Lucy decided. “She doesn’t even diet, and she has to be at least five feet ten.”
Through his laughter, David tried to tell Lucy that she didn’t look very Jewish either.
“Don’t laugh at me. And even he doesn’t look a bit Jewish. I’ll bet they’re passing.”
David stared at her, his mouth open. “That’s wonderful. That’s positively wonderful.”
“I don’t like to be laughed at. Hey, that would be wonderful, two of these classy Leighton Ridge Wasps trying to pass as Jews. Infiltrating.”
“Infiltrating what, Lucy? Did I ever tell you about Father Joey Mulligan?”
“No.”
“Funny, I should think I would have. Anyway, he was a Catholic chaplain, and the two of us were together a great deal and we became wonderful friends. He was given a parish in New Mexico, but I’m sure he’ll turn up here one day. Well, the way it happened, one of the kids, a G.I., was looking for the rabbi — I think he was from the field artillery — and I tell him that I’m the rabbi, and he says that I don’t look Jewish. Joey Mulligan is standing there, and he grabs this field artillery kid by the arm and says, ‘I want to tell you a little story, sonny.’ The kid is maybe eighteen and Joey is twenty-six, but in that army it was quite a gap.
“‘There was this Jewish feller,’ Joey tells him, ‘and he liked to travel, and wherever he went, he looks for the local synagogue. This time he’s in Tokyo, and it takes a little time but finally he finds the local synagogue, and after the service, he goes up to the rabbi and says to him — that is, he says it to the little Japanese rabbi — “Rabbi, I’m an American Jew and I really enjoyed your service.” Then the rabbi looks at him carefully and shakes his head. “You don’t look Jewish,” the rabbi says.’”
“That’s a nice touch for Mulligan,” Lucy said. “What did the kid do?”
“He asked Mulligan what he meant.”
“There you are. That’s why all those nice parables Jesus kept dropping around don’t do Christians much good. I finished the Old Testament. I’m on the New Testament now.”
Nevertheless, Lucy became quite fond of Dora Buckingham. Dora’s family had come to America from Germany in the great migration of 1848. Her husband, Alan, was from an old Virginia family, Episcopalian, his marriage regarded with anger and contempt by said old Virginia family. A bad heart had kept him out of the service, and he bore this as a heavy burden of guilt and remorse, and while he had not formally become Jewish, he pressed Dora to raise their children as Jews.
It was he who approached David about his mother-in-law’s impending death, and it was then that he made his position absolutely clear. “Rabbi, I’m not Jewish. I know your wife is friendly with my wife, so you probably know that, but I specify it just in case you didn’t know. My wife is Jewish, so, according to Jewish law, the children are Jewish.”
“You didn’t have to tell me that. I did know, as a matter of fact.”
“Well, that’s only in passing. The main reason I am here is that my mother-in-law is dying. The doctors tell us another few weeks at the most. She knows, and she desires to be buried in the consecrated ground of a Jewish cemetery. She also knows there is no Jewish cemetery here, but she desperately wants to be buried here, close to her children and grandchildren.”
“I can understand that,” David agreed. “But you know, Alan, we have a very high water table here on the Ridge. You’ve seen what happens in a heavy rainstorm. The ground fills up like a sponge, and that’s no good for a cemetery. We need a place where the water table is at least twenty feet below the surface and stays that way, and it has to be a fairly flat field — not easy to find in Leighton Ridge. Well, we found a place like that, adjoining the Episcopalian cemetery.”
“Oh, yes. I know the place.”
“They don’t need it. They have enough burying space for the next two hundred years, and all we want is eight acres, and we’re ready to pay a very good price.”
“But?”
“But we’re Jewish. You know, Alan, I have seen such monstrous anti-Semitism in Germany that it’s hard for me to adapt to the kind of genteel dislike for Jews that I meet here.”
“Like hell it’s genteel.”
“I looked at the town records. The Episcopalians own about nineteen acres, apart from what they use for their cemetery, and our estimate is that eight acres should see us through the next hundred years. So I took it to their rector. Do you know him?”
“Bradshaw? Yes! I have the misfortune of knowing him. That misbegotten horse’s ass has been over to the house three times, trying to bring me back to the church. Oh, he’s all right, I guess. He just doesn’t have a brain in his head.” He paused to stare at David. “He’s putting you off?”
“Not so much him as the vestry. They have a treasurer, name of Sudbury, and a secretary, name of Hornblower.”
“Tall, skinny cadavers with no lips — oh, yes, I know them. Always had a sneaking suspicion that Hornblower was a lapsed Jew — what is it my mother-in-law calls them?”
“Geshmat’ Yid?”
“That’s it. He hates Jews with a passion — deep down in the belly. Hornblower. Ten to one that was not his father’s name. Sell to Jews? Over his dead body. Sudbury is something else — believes he has a mission from God never to give up an inch of church land. What does the rector say? Would he sell us the land if the vestry agreed?”
“I think so. But you said there’s no way to move Sudbury and Hornblower.”
“Not for ordinary mortals like you and me, Rabbi, but there are ways. My father was a very dear friend to Charley Gilbert.”
“And who was Charley Gilbert?”
“Bishop Charles Gilbert, and he is. I mean he’s alive and ambulatory, and top man at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine — which sits at One hundred and tenth Street in New York and which happens to be the largest Episcopal cathedral in the world, and which thereby has a very large measure of clout. Tomorrow morning I shall drive down there, exercise charm and pleading, and bring the bishop back with me.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Oh, no. I’m absolutely serious.”
“I mean, why should Bishop Gilbert come?”
“He loves this kind of thing. Also, there’s the simple matter of decency. He’s a decent person. He’ll come.”
He came; he let a few words drop here and there; and he had a pleasant dinner with Sudbury and Hornblower and Alan Buckingham. Votes were changed; the papers were drawn up; and there was a Jewish cemetery at Leighton Ridge. And now, he, David Hartman, was presiding over the funeral of Flora Schultz, the first death, the first hole dug six feet deep into this windswept Connecticut hillside. Somehow, strangely, inexplicably, this passing away of an old woman of seventy-nine years, a passing that was like a blade of grass gently picked up and cast away by the wind, reached into him more deeply than all the deaths by violenc
e that he had witnessed overseas. Perhaps it was the total absence of violence, the coolness and beauty of the afternoon, the trees just breaking into their first yellow-green froth of spring — whatever it was, it gave him a moment of grace, so deep and true and painful that he felt the tears well into his eyes, not for grief but simply because the universe was true at that moment. So should a person go, in the fullness of years. As it was meant to be. But that too was an illusion. The world went on outside Leighton Ridge.
And when he intoned the mourner’s Kaddish, the moment of grace washed away and he was back at Dachau, with the skinny, starved, hollow-eyed Jewish prisoners.
At home later, Lucy said, “You did very well.”
“At what?”
“I mean the funeral service, of course.”
“Oh? Well, I don’t know. It’s not a contest, is it? You look around at the circle standing by the grave, and you wonder who is pleased and who is agonized.”
“Pleased? I never knew you to be cynical before.”
David shrugged. “I guess I never thought much about old. Old is a sort of nasty word in our society. Oh, what in hell am I talking about? Not with Dora and Alan. They loved the old lady.”
He turned away abruptly and went up the narrow staircase to the tiny room under the eaves that he called his study. Directly outside his window was a splendid copper beech, which legend held had been planted a hundred years before by Abraham Stanford, the great Abolitionist leader and agitator, who was parson here at Leighton Ridge before he removed to Boston to head up the antislavery movement there. His presence had made Leighton Ridge briefly famous during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Beyond the beech, two fine, high white pines framed a view across the Ridge and into the far distance. David sprawled in a chair, staring through the window and thinking thoughts that led nowhere. One old lady dies, like cut grass blown in the wind. He had been witness to a war that left fifty million human beings dead. No mind can grasp it, not the gas chambers of Adolf Hitler, not the atomic victims of Hiroshima, the burned flesh falling away from bones while they spelled out the logic of an eye for an eye with their Japanese screams of pain.
His mind was traveling that path as Lucy entered the room. She stood at the door and asked, “What is it, David?”
“What is it? Me? The world? Leighton Ridge?”
“Come on. You’re so low you could eat off your shoe tops without bending.” She dropped into a chair. “Maybe I can help.”
“Maybe, but not likely.” He managed a smile. “You were never cut out to be a rabbi’s wife.”
“Rebbetsin. I hate that word.”
“Why ever did you marry me?”
“Dumbbell. I loved you.”
“And now?”
“Pushy, aren’t you? Now I’m settled in. We have a child who has begun to walk very nicely, and I’m knocked up again. And I’ve become a prime Sunday school teacher. David, what has gotten into you?”
“I want to go to Israel.” There it was, out and said.
“What?”
“A Jewish state has come into being. A Jewish army is at war with five Arab countries that outnumber them ten to one. Lucy, can you sit here in this damned Leighton Ridge and pretend that the world doesn’t exist?”
“I don’t pretend that it doesn’t exist. I know it exists. I also know that we’re connected with it, Leighton Ridge or any other place.”
“You haven’t heard a word I said.”
“Every word. You give up your job here, leave your pregnant wife and son to scrabble as best they may — and off to Israel. Another rabbi is just what they need.”
“You can be just lovely when you put your mind to it.”
“Why don’t you call me a nasty bitch? No one here except the two of us, and nobody lived with the United States Army as long as you did without learning a few proper Anglo-Saxon words.”
“You can’t understand one damned thing that happens inside of me, not my dreams, my hopes, my agonies.”
“Have you ever tried to understand what happens inside of me, David? A fetus is happening inside of me. And incidentally, what would be your mission there? Join the Haganah? Fight? Kill people?”
“You know better than that.”
“The strange thing is, I do. You’re the gentlest man I ever met. I think that was the most important thing that made me want to marry you. War may bring out the best in some, but when you spend three years with the U.S.O., you can bet your bottom dollar that it brings out the worst in most. You really want to go to Israel?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I only want to get away from here.”
“There are easier ways. We can burn down the house. I’m serious, Dave. I don’t give two damns if you stop being a rabbi.”
“You never did,” he said with annoyance.
“So?”
“Oh, what the hell! I never could explain it to you. I’ve tried for two years, and that’s long enough.”
“Explain what!”
“Come on, come on,” he said. “We’re building up to a real fight. I don’t want to fight with you.”
“Why? Because you’re a rabbi?”
“Because it only hurts. It doesn’t help.”
“Maybe it would help. Maybe it would help if we screamed at each other and let some pus out of the wound. You’re a rabbi. I don’t know what a rabbi is; I only suspect that he’s supposed to reflect some aspect of civilization.” She was shouting now. “Fifty million people are killed in that lousy war — fifty million — six million Jews, one third of the Jews on earth! And now again, more killing, and my husband the rabbi tells me he has to be there! For God’s sake, go.” She stood up and drove a finger at him. “You know something, David Hartman, this thing you and all the rest of the ministers and priests and parsons call God — this thing makes me damned uneasy!”
David sat, staring in astonishment, as Lucy stormed out of the room.
He was astonished, put off, hurt, yet absolutely intrigued by her response. He tried to remember her exact words — this thing, all right, God is a thing, this thing makes me nervous — no, damned uneasy was what she had said, and it put him back to when he was digging a hole, he and a G.I. named O’Brien. A spatter of machine gun fire had thrown them together, and when O’Brien yelled, “Dig, goddamnit, dig!” David obeyed without any discussion of rank. They dug insanely, and when they were three feet down, O’Brien said, “We don’t need to go to China, Father.”
David dropped his trenching tool and wiped his brow. “We don’t call rabbis father. My name is Dave Hartman.”
“Lewis O’Brien.”
“Catholic?”
“Not even lapsed, Rabbi. Begging your pardon, I spit when I hear the word. I have resigned. Would you believe it, I was a candidate for the priesthood once? I intended to be the most outstanding, smartass Jesuit the world ever saw, and I even talked myself into the possibility that I would give up women.”
“What changed it?” David asked.
“The war — and contemplation on that peculiar thing that you and the other sky merchants call God.”
David brooded over the memory, wondering what Lucy’s response would be if he asked her why she thought of God as a thing. Then he went downstairs and asked her, trying to be as soft and appeasing as possible.
“Did I say that?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what I meant. You can’t talk about God, David. You know that.”
“But I do talk about —”
“You were going to say ‘Him,’ weren’t you? And then you stopped yourself. Why did you stop yourself? Isn’t it him anymore? Then what do I do with that Bible I teach the kids. It doesn’t say he made woman in his own image. Too much confusion of gender.”
She knew all his weak spots, his confusion and fears. “Why are you doing this, Lucy?” he asked her.
“I’m sorry. Oh, David, I’m sorry as hell. It just put me off and scared the very devil out of me when you started that busines
s about Israel. David, I love you so much and I get so confused.”
“I’m not going to Israel,” he admitted.
“I’m pregnant again. You know that. I mean, if all you wanted in the world was to get over there, you’d need every dollar we have saved up, but if being pregnant —”
He grabbed her in a bear hug and cut off her words. “Lucy, I do love you so much.”
“I’m glad. I have a treat for you tonight.”
“Oh?”
“Blintzes.”
“You’re kidding. Where did you learn to make blintzes? From your mother?”
“My mother? I’m not even sure she knows what one is.”
“Then where?”
“Millie Carter,” Lucy said smugly. “You see, you don’t have to be Jewish. She has a Jewish cookbook, and we worked it out together. And Della Klein brought over a quart of homemade strawberry jam. I’ve learned to accept anything given. I guess it’s a rule of the business that preachers must be beggars —”
“Lucy —”
“Just kidding, forgive me. A gift of love, and I do love Della. She’s dear.”
David ate the blintzes. They were very good, as was the strawberry jam Della Klein had provided. As a boy he had lived with a mother who disdained blintzes. They were a product of Russian-Jewish cookery, whereas the Hartmans were of German-Jewish extraction. This only added a pleasant zest to the taste of the blintzes.
“Just delicious,” David said. “The jam too. Della is talented. I’m glad you’ve been able to make so many friends here.”
“Of course, it’s you Della adores. But I do have friends. Do you know why?”
“You’re a sweet and friendly person. Why shouldn’t you make friends here?”
“No. You’re not even scratching it, David. We’ve been here two years, and you’re telling me you don’t realize how lonely and miserable most of the women here are, Jew and Gentile alike?”
