by Howard Fast
David shook his head, mute.
“Then let me explain. When God told Moses to go forth and speak to Pharaoh for our people, Moses demanded God’s name. It was a time when there were many gods, with many names, but the Almighty answered simply, ‘I am what I am.’ Do you understand?”
“I think so,” David said.
“So. Finish your tea. You want to give up the rabbinate, give it up. You want to leave your wife, leave her. You want to go to Israel, go. Only get rid of the illusions.”
That evening, glum and silent, he helped Lucy bathe the baby. “You know something,” she said to David. “This ancient bathtub is impossible and our hot-water system is impossible, and I’m always afraid that the electric heater will blow the current, and I wouldn’t be one bit unhappy to live in a clean modern house where there’s insulation, and the basement ceiling is more than four feet high, and the windows and the roof don’t leak.” She saw his expression. “God help me, I’ve said something wrong again.”
“It’s nothing you said. It’s just the way I feel.”
“I think you should go off to Israel for a while. Oh, come on, David. I’m only kidding.”
He wrapped little Aaron in the towel, handed him over to his mother, and stalked out.
David left the house and walked along the path that led to the old church. Today was Tuesday, the eighteenth of May, just four days since the declaration of independence was announced in the old museum at Tel Aviv, and he was here, trapped in this Connecticut backwater, with a wife who could not for the life of her understand what moved him, and a comfortable middle-class congregation that appeared already to have forgotten that there ever was a Holocaust in which millions of Jews died.
There was moonlight and starlight, and whatever one might say about Leighton Ridge, the air was pure here, and tonight there was enough moonlight to fill the interior of the church with a pallid glow. David opened and closed the door gently, as if there were someone inside to be disturbed or awakened, and then he stood in the aisle, looking toward the sanctuary. The interior, as well as the exterior, was still more or less as it had been a hundred and seventy-five years ago. David’s people had painted the chair rail white, the walls above it blue, scraped the floor and every bit of woodwork, oiled the wood, polished it, and repaired the pews; and they had put a new roof on the old church. The Unitarians would get a good, sound building.
David wondered whether Belsen was right, whether this old building helped him to cross some sort of a barrier. And did he want to? Israel was not a Jewish thing, as the world knew Jewish things, a tiny army of strong sunburned young men defying the entire world. Why was he clinging to this church? Osner and the others were right — absolutely right. They needed a new building.
“God help me,” David said aloud, wondering then why — and for what? For his sense of loss?
When he came back to the house, Lucy was sitting in the tiny room they had turned into a nursery, gently rocking the baby.
“Are you all right?” she asked him.
“I think so.”
“I make silly jokes, David. But if you went off and left me now, I don’t know what I should do.”
“Lucy, are you happy?” he asked her gently.
“Happy? You mean generally speaking? I don’t know. You got me to reading the Bible. Does it say anywhere there that a person should be happy?”
“Why do you do that? Why can’t you just answer a question?”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Why don’t you just come out with it and say you’re as unhappy as hell?”
“Because I’m not. I have my ups and downs, David. But I’m not as unhappy as hell.”
He told himself he was behaving like a fool, a boor, but he was unable to say that to Lucy. Or to tell her that he was a rabbi who did not know why he was a rabbi.
The following morning the door knocker clanged as they were finishing breakfast. It was a rainy morning, a light, steady spring rain, and outside were two men in saddle shoes, seersucker suits, and Panama hats. David opened the door. The two men took out wallets and opened them to display identification.
“I’m Agent Thompson. This is Agent Clark. House Committee on Un-American Activities.”
David nodded.
“We’d like to talk to you.”
David waited. Lucy joined him.
“You are Rabbi David Hartman?”
David nodded again.
“Can we come in?”
“All right.” He pointed toward their little parlor. “You can come in, but I have nothing to say to you.”
“How do you know that, sir? We haven’t asked you any questions.”
“True.”
“We’ve come here with the best of intentions, Rabbi Hartman, and we come to you, not only as a man of God, but as a captain in the United States Army Reserve.”
The other said, “We simply want to talk to you about a member of your congregation, a Mr. Michael Benton.”
“How do you know he’s a member of my congregation?” David asked them.
“We have ways.”
“Can we sit down, Rabbi?” the other asked.
“No.”
“What!” It was less a question than an expression of astonishment.
“No. I said no, you may not sit down. That would imply a gesture of hospitality on my part. But I can offer you no hospitality.” Dropping his voice, he added, “I am a Jew. By our law, I am not permitted to suffer swine in my dwelling place, so the sooner you leave, the better.”
They stared at him in amazement. “What is this, Rabbi, a joke of some sort?”
“No joke. Just go.”
“You may regret this.”
“Just go.”
Lucy held the door open for them and then closed it behind them. She stared at David as if she had never seen him before, and then she burst out laughing and through her laughter said, “Oh, David, David, if you could have seen yourself! And so quiet and sweet. I never would have dreamed it, not in a thousand years.”
“It’s nothing to laugh about. You read in the papers about those bastards and their demented committee and Rankin and Parnell Thomas and all the rest of them, and it could be on another planet, and then suddenly here it is, in Leighton Ridge. Lucy, they are Nazis — here, in my home.” He was still trembling with anger.
“I’ve heard of Mike Benton, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen him.”
“He’s a member of the congregation, and he makes substantial contributions, but I don’t think he’s ever been present at services. I met him at the last social evening, big, redheaded fellow, very pleasant, very easygoing. He was an infantryman, out in the Pacific. Good record and some citations for valor. He never speaks of the war, but Arnie Cohen was with him for a while, and it was because of all Arnie’s sentimental memories of Leighton Ridge — he had a friend who lived here before the war — that Mike Benton decided to come here and write a novel when he was blacklisted on the Coast.”
“That’s where I read about him. Was he called before the committee?”
“Not yet.”
“Are you going to talk to him?”
“I think I should — although to what end, I don’t know.”
“Anyway, David Hartman, you did a nice piece of business. My hat’s off to you.”
“For what?”
She kissed him. How could she say “For not behaving like your normal everyday rabbi?” A while later, driving to the other end of the Ridge, where Mike Benton lived, he mused on the fact that small crises could bring out so many interesting qualities in people. Nothing had actually changed between him and Lucy, or improved, or been settled, yet for a few moments they were very close together. That helped, he decided.
Mike Benton lived in a tiny modern house that he had bought cheaply, for a modern house was the last thing people who set out to live on the Ridge desired. It sat in a cluster of trees, with no lawn and no apparent attempt to make the clump of trees other than what
they were, a second growth of scrawny oak and maple. A gravel driveway led up to the house. David parked his car and rang the bell.
“Come in!” Benton shouted.
David entered, calling out, “Dave Hartman!”
“In here, Rabbi.”
A girl appeared. She was in her twenties, dark, with large, beautiful myopic eyes, round all over without being fat, dressed in an old skirt, sweater, and loafers. “I’m Miriam,” she said, “and why he won’t let me answer the door properly, heaven only knows. I followed him from the Coast, and I live with him, Rabbi, if it doesn’t shock you.”
“It would have shocked my mother,” David admitted.
“Who the hell is it, Mitzie?” Benton demanded.
“The rabbi. Didn’t he just tell you? Didn’t you say ‘In here, Rabbi’? Are you drunk? It’s ten o’clock in the morning.”
“It’s fucken raining. You know how I feel about a lousy rainy morning —”
David was looking around the living room, a tasteless mélange of tasteless furniture.
“He rented it furnished,” the girl said, her voice listless now. “He’s in there,” pointing to a door.
Through the door was the dining room, which Benton had turned into his workroom, using the big, ugly table as a desk, piling books everywhere, filling the room with a smell of tobacco from his pipe and gin from a glass and bottle. He sat with an old portable typewriter on a stand in front of him. Table and floor were littered with paper.
“Forgive me,” he said to David. “I’m such a slob. I know why you’re here, Rabbi. Those motherfucken bastards got to me first. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t use that language in front of you, but I spent two solid years in the Pacific, island to island, and if it didn’t make me crazy, it sure as hell enriched my use of the language. Some of the kids out there reached a point where they were inserting motherfucker between every second word. At least I use it as a proper adjective.”
David shrugged. “I had four years of G.I. English.”
“Yeah, I heard.” He began to pour gin into the glass, and then he swept glass and bottle off the table. Miriam burst into the room at the crash, but stopped inside the door and stood watching. “The hell with it,” Benton said. “I’m not a drunk. I’m scared. I’m scared shitless.”
“Of what?” David asked gently.
“Of going to jail. I know, I’m a big hero. When I got back, my fellow writers, my peers, gave me a big bash at the Beverly Wilshire, a pisspot hotel that’s all the class Beverly Hills has to offer. Mike Benton, hero. Judy Garland sang ‘Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition’ all for me. And they were right. We’re going into Guadalcanal, and I’m standing on deck, five in the morning, cool as a cucumber, Mike Benton, hero, and we’re maybe ten miles out, which is bad, bad submarine water, and there’s a guy next to me who’s been through everything there is, but he’s so terrified of submarines, he begins to shit in his pants, literally. So with me, it’s jail. That’s my private horror; like his was submarines. I can’t go to jail. So help me God, I’ll die if I have to go to jail.”
“Who said you’re going to jail, Mike?”
He sorted through the papers in front of him, found what he wanted, and handed it to David. “Look at it, Rabbi. It’s a subpoena from that lousy House Un-American Committee. They dropped it off here before they went to see you.”
“Will you tell him it’s just a piece of paper and it don’t mean a damned thing?” Miriam asked pleadingly.
“She’s right. It’s only a summons.”
“How much you don’t know, Rabbi! Sure it’s a summons. I go down there to that committee, and first thing they ask me is, am I now or was I ever a member of the Communist Party?”
“So you say no. Mike, it’s not the end of the world.”
“I don’t say no, because that’s perjury, and perjury is good for five years in jail. The most they can give me for contempt is one year, and I don’t say no because I was a member for three weeks before the war. Hell, I’m blacklisted already, so how much worse can it be in that direction? But then they start asking me to name names, who was at the meetings, is Joe Shmuck a communist? Is Dizzy Dolly a communist? That’s the way they did it in Hollywood, and I can’t go to jail. I can’t go to jail. I tell you, I can’t hack it.”
“What about this Fifth Amendment thing I’ve been reading about?” David asked him. “Maybe you could use it. A good lawyer — why don’t you talk to Jack Osner about it? I hear he’s a first-class lawyer.”
“Jack Osner! Come on, Rabbi, you got to be kidding. Jack Osner is a loathsome son of a bitch who’d sell his own mother if the Un-American Committee wanted her.”
“Why do you say that, Mike?”
“Rabbi, wake up. Or maybe you don’t want to. That shithead Osner, who sat on his ass in the Pentagon and made it right up to the rank of colonel, turned in Joel Kritsky, the labor lawyer. When they were kids, Kritsky joined the Y.C.L. — Young Communist League to you — and Osner knew about it. Back in ’forty-two, Kritsky was pulled into the Judge Advocate, where the country really needed him, and Osner learned about it and denounced him. And you didn’t know this?”
“I’m afraid not,” David said. “And I can’t make moral judgments about the people in my congregation.”
“That’s a cop-out.”
“I hope not. And whatever I can do to help — well, tell me, and I’ll do what I can.”
Mike Benton made no reply to that. He sat behind the big table, staring at the mess of papers in front of him, but at the outer door, as he was leaving, Miriam said to David, “I want to thank you, Rabbi, and so would he, if he could. You must understand his situation. Except for me, he’s utterly alone. He hasn’t made a friend here. You know, he can’t. He can’t make a friend who hasn’t been through what he’s been through. His friends are out on the Coast. His life is out there too. He’s so alone and so frightened — but what he told you is true. He was in the worst of the Pacific war, and he was a legend. I heard it from so many people, not from him, but from so many others. And now he’s as frightened of jail as a little boy is of the dark. So if you could help him —”
“How?”
“Just come back a few times and talk to him. He’ll talk to you because he knows about your war record. Rabbi, I don’t understand how this crazy business works with men, but it does.”
“I’ll come back,” David said.
Back at the parsonage, David entered through the kitchen door. Aaron was in his playpen, trying his legs, and Lucy was pummeling dough for making bread. Homemade bread had started about three months before, and by now had become something of a compulsion, but when David appeared, she stopped and wiped off her hands. “Surprise,” she said. “The Unitarians are going to paint, after all.”
“What on earth?”
“David, what’s wrong with me? I can’t deal with anything except with some stupid wisecrack. Come on, I’ll show you.”
“Aaron?”
“He’ll be all right. We won’t be out of sight of the house.”
“Where are we going?”
“To the old church.”
“What happened?” David asked her, tense already with a sense of impending disaster. “Also, do I engage in male insecurity?”
“Sometimes.”
“You’re kidding. Tell me what happened.”
“Better see it yourself than have me describe it.”
“The church is there. It hasn’t burned down.”
“Come around to the back.”
At the back of the church, David realized what she meant. Three large swastikas had been painted on the clapboard siding, one in black and the other two in red. For a long moment, David stood silent and stared at the hooked crosses. Then he went over and touched the paint. “Dry,” he murmured. “Last night.”
“We should have had a dog. He might have barked,” Lucy said. “That’s a shame.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference.”
“It scares m
e. Does it scare you, David?”
“Yes. But it angers me more.”
“But who would do it, David? Here in Leighton Ridge — who would do it?”
“Kids, I suppose.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“What are you going to do? I was thinking that you could paint over them and then pretend it never happened.”
“Except that whoever did it would know that it happened. No, I think I’ll try to get as many of the board together as I can tonight and talk about it. You know, it’s our synagogue, but when we talk about it we call it the old church. It sort of remains a church, doesn’t it?”
He put it to the board as he had put it to Lucy, and most of them stared at him blankly. The board now consisted of twelve people, even though the week-to-week business of the synagogue was still conducted by Osner, Hurtz, and Klein. Osner was nominally the president of the synagogue, and though the charter called for election of a president and other officers every two years, the matter had been postponed for three weeks now. Two other members of the board were available on short notice, Eddie Frome, thirty-one years old, a writer who had made the transition from Yank to The New Yorker magazine, and Oscar Denton, seventy-one years old and the first Jew to live in Leighton Ridge. David invited Alan Buckingham, which caused Osner to take David aside and inquire why Buckingham was there.
“I have my reasons,” David said.
“You don’t want to share them?”
“I will, later.”
“That’s a little arrogant, Rabbi. I would think that, in a matter like this, it ought to be kept among our people.”
“Alan’s a member of the congregation. That makes him our people.” And after calling the meeting to order, David said to them, “You’ve all had the opportunity to look at the swastikas, and I asked Jack to get a few of us together this evening so that we could decide what to do about it. You see Alan Buckingham, who’s not a member of the board and who in a literal sense is not Jewish, although his family does belong to the congregation. Coming out of this ghastly war that we’ve all lived through, we named our congregation Shalom. We could hardly have named it anything else, and I’d like us to keep that in mind when we talk tonight. We’re all angry, but we have a problem that we can’t solve with anger. I want to point out something else, which touches on Alan Buckingham’s presence. The swastikas were painted not only on a synagogue, but on a church, and not on any church, but on a New England Congregational church, one of a group of ancient churches that defined so much of what this country would be. And whether or not whoever did this intended it, a church was desecrated as much as a synagogue.”
