by Howard Fast
“Who are you to tell me what to do?”
“I’m you’re rabbi, and either you will damned well listen to me or I walk out of here right now.” He rose.
“No. Please,” Mrs. Seligman begged him.
“All right. But I will talk and you will listen. Is that agreed?”
They both nodded silently.
“All right. Now whoever the father may be, a child of that age should not be married or bear a child. So we won’t discuss that. I want you to take her to Dr. Levine tomorrow.”
“And tell the whole world,” Mrs. Seligman wailed.
“We will tell no one, but we have to talk about your daughter and how to treat her and try to save her life. Don’t you see how important that is?”
It was past midnight when he came home. Millie Carter was with Lucy. It was eight days since Herb Spendler’s death, and still Lucy lived with a terror of being alone. David apologized. “The Seligmans are in bad trouble. I couldn’t leave earlier.”
“You mean the kid and Freddy Bliss?” Lucy asked.
David sighed. “I pledged my word no one would know.”
“It’s around,” Millie said. “This Bliss kid is a damned little monster, and your Seligman child is no angel. Will the family remain here?”
“I imagine so.”
Millie shook her head hopelessly. “I’m off now. It would be so nice to be without a congregation for a while, wouldn’t it, David? I’m going to find us a tiny isle for R and R, populated entirely by Druids.”
About two weeks later, Martin Carter telephoned David and asked him to please come over to the church. The new Congregational church was about a mile and a half from the synagogue and David’s home. It was on toward evening, the cold winter sun beginning to set.
“I can’t imagine what he has in mind,” David told Lucy, “but I’ll be back in time for supper.”
Martin’s office, lit up now, was at the back of the church. His secretary had gone home. Martin opened the door, and inside David saw a man and two boys. The boys were about fourteen years old. The man, about forty, was heavily built, sloping shoulders, powerful arms and hands. He wore a sheepskin jacket and denim trousers. David learned later that he was a builder, living in Leighton Ridge and with his business in Danbury. His name, Martin informed David, was Thomas Hendley.
“Mr. Hendley,” Martin said, “is a member of our church. This,” indicating one of the boys, “is his son, Robert, and this young man’s name,” indicating the other boy, “is Joe Menaro. They’re here because Mr. Hendley brought them here. They’re responsible for the damage done to the synagogue.”
“I’m prepared to pay the cost, and they’re going to work it off or I’ll take it out of their hides. I’ll tell you this, Rabbi, and right to your face. I don’t like you people any better than the next one, but we don’t do things this way in America.” Hendley paused for breath. “We’re not hoodlums or the Mafia.”
“How did you find out that the boys did it?” David asked.
“Robert told his mother.”
“Perhaps you could wait outside and let us talk to the boys,” David said.
Hendley stared at him suspiciously. Martin said, “It might help, Mr. Hendley. Just for a few minutes.”
“Whatever you do, they brought it on themselves. You going to call the police?”
“That’s not what I had in mind.”
“What the police do,” said Hendley, “that’s legal.”
“I’m a minister,” Martin said, “and he’s a rabbi. We don’t beat children.”
“All right — and remember, I can’t stay here all night. I’m willing to pay all the damages.”
The door closed behind him. Martin pushed a couple of chairs toward the boys. “Sit down.”
“We’re not calling the police,” David said. “Mr. Hendley will pay the costs, and you can settle with him. But nobody gets a free ride, and the price of being able to walk out of here without a police record is to answer some questions I’ll put to you.”
For the first time since he had come into the room, the two boys raised their heads to look directly at David.
“What questions, mister?”
“Call him Rabbi Hartman when you address him,” Martin said.
“Question one: Why did you do it?”
Hendley remained silent. Menaro shrugged and shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“How many Jews do you know?”
“Some kids in school.”
“Do you like them or hate them?”
“They’re okay,” Menaro said.
Hendley nodded.
“Do you know what a swastika is?”
No response.
“You painted them over the front of the synagogue and on the scroll. Do you know what the scroll was?”
No response. They just sat, silent, and stared at him.
“That scroll we call the Torah — a Hebrew word for Law. In it, hand-lettered, are the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. It’s the Jewish Bible, the Protestant Bible, and the Catholic Bible — all the same. Would you have defaced it if you had known that?”
Still, they were silent.
“It won’t do,” David said softly. “You answer my questions, or I call in the cops. Now, would you have defaced that scroll if you knew it was a Bible?”
“No,” they muttered.
“All right. Let’s go back to the swastikas, the hooked cross you painted on the front of the synagogue. What is the swastika?”
“It’s Nazi,” Hendley said.
“What about you, Menaro? Did you know that?”
“Yeah.”
“And I’m sure that both of you know that the Nazis hated the Jews. They murdered six million Jews. In one day, over eight thousand Jewish women and children were put to death, gassed. But the Nazis, the people whose symbol you painted on our house of worship, didn’t stop with the Jews. They murdered over three hundred thousand Gypsies. They executed thousands of Italians and French and every other nationality in Europe. In fact, not since God created the world has any group been responsible for as much suffering and for as many deaths as this same Nazi Party of Germany. I want you to know this so that the next time you use a symbol, you will try to understand it. Now you can go.”
After the boys had left, Martin and David sat in silence for a minute or so. Then Martin said, “I think you were right. I wouldn’t have thought of it that way.”
David rose. “Lucy’s still holding dinner.”
“No time for a drink? One drink?”
“It’s no good when I feel this way.”
“How’s that?”
“Filled with despair.”
•
PART FIVE
1956
•
In 1956, spring came to Leighton Ridge like a gentle benediction, indeed like a promise of peace and good will. The world was without war — that is, without a major war — and the President of the United States had turned out to be an amiable old gentleman who did not enjoy rocking the boat. Even Senator McCarthy had been brought to bay and silenced, and in a tiny village in an unimportant corner of Connecticut, Lucy Hartman had invited a few people to dinner. The children had been fed and put to bed, where they would by no means sleep immediately, but whisper to each other and sneak down the hall to the staircase and try to pick up the conversation downstairs. Mrs. Holtzman, a stout, middle-aged lady who was the only survivor of a German-Jewish family that had perished in the concentration camps, was there, helping with the cooking and serving, and the dining room table had been extended to its greatest length to accommodate eight people.
Aside from the Hartmans, the dinner guests were Mel Klein, the president of the synagogue; his wife, Della; Eddie Frome and his wife, Sophie; and Millie and Martin Carter. They were the best friends that David and Lucy had made since coming to Leighton Ridge. Mel Klein at sixty-one was a father figure of sorts; Della, twenty years younger, was Lu
cy’s rock and consolation. When she wept, when she had to be a little girl, when she hated Leighton Ridge so bitterly that she was ready to pack a suitcase and walk out, it was Della’s bosom that received her, and Della’s gentle praise of David that made Lucy look at David newly. Indeed, sometimes Lucy felt that Della was in love with David. Yet this was never a threat. As for Eddie Frome, not only did he bring them his world of The New Yorker, one of the very few places where wit and common sense and sanity still survived, but he himself was a source of amiable intelligence. The fact that he had the reputation of consoling certain lonely and unhappy women in the neighborhood did not press David toward judgment. His wife, Sophie, accepted it. She was a very slender, delicate woman who adored their single child, a boy of ten named Philip, and who adored her husband. She said little at any gathering, but she was sweet and sufficiently doll-like to be accepted with her silence. And Martin and Millie Carter were relaxed in the one place they felt they could say anything they pleased and not be rebuked by one or another section of their parishioners.
“We talk from premises,” Ed Frome said, after there had been a round of tributes to the spring weather. “If no premises are shared, no conversation is possible.”
“But arguments.”
“Not conversation. Something else.”
“No brotherhood is possible,” Martin Carter said.
“I think arguments are conversation,” Lucy said.
“Brotherhood is your shtick, Martin,” Frome said. “I’m a simple semanticist, and I take my hat off to bad weather as well as good weather. You see, we share. Everyone loves a cool, sunny day. Everyone is depressed when it rains. Everyone is cold, everyone is hot. Marvelous shared premises.”
“I’ll be the silly one,” Della said. “Why no conversation without a shared premise?”
“Conversation. You know, the word once meant a way of life, a style of living. But not today — today, Della, it’s a relaxed exchange of thoughts. Well, suppose I say to you that the Soviet Union is a good place to live. You believe it’s a very bad place to live. We share no premise. That makes conversation difficult.”
“It makes jokes more difficult — what you call your premise,” Mel Klein said. “In my shop yesterday, two Puerto Rican workers are having a bitter argument. They try to pull me into it. I say, ‘Hold on. I’ll tell you a story. This fellow’s walking down the street and he comes across two men having a bitter argument. He listens to this one, he listens to that one, he listens to this one, he listens to that one — and then he shakes his head, says, “Don’t make me crazy,” and walks away.’ Would you believe these two fellows in my shop, they don’t know what I’m talking about?”
“No wonder,” Della said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I’m Jewish.” She turned to Millie Carter. “Do you get that joke, Millie?”
“I’m afraid not.”
Mrs. Holtzman came in with an apple tart. There was much praise for the tart, which Lucy had created. There was talk about Sanka, real coffee, and tea. Lucy cut the tart and sent the plates around the table. More praise for the tart after they tasted it.
“Still and all,” David said, “that question of the premise which Eddie talks about is very important, and I know just what you mean, Mel. Without a shared premise, you can’t tell a joke. I was in a little stone farmhouse in France with half a dozen G.I.s, and we were under heavy fire, and in a moment of silence, one of the kids said to me, you know, kind of bragging, ‘What the hell, Rabbi, everyone has to die some time.’ I said to him, ‘I know, I know, but I want to die in a very special way. I want to die in a corner room at Mount Sinai Hospital at the age of ninety-seven, all my relatives gathered around, a bowl of fruit on one side of my bed, a jar of nuts on the other.’ Well, by now all the kids were listening. No one laughed. Finally, one of them said, ‘Rabbi, what would you want with that jar of nuts, you in there dying?’”
The men around the table burst into laughter. Millie looked at Lucy, “Is it that I’m not Jewish, or do I totally lack a sense of humor, or is it that premise of Eddie’s?”
“None. What David told those kids in the farmhouse is an old Jewish vaudeville cliché. In a Jewish hospital, or I suppose in any hospital, corner rooms are the most expensive. Dying in a corner room shows status. Having the family around shows status in the family. And when I was a little girl and we visited someone in the hospital, we brought nuts, fruit, and flowers. And I suppose, David, the kids were from Tennessee or Iowa or some such place?”
“No doubt, no doubt, but you put your finger on so much of it — the shared premise, I mean. Our society would fall apart without it.”
“This is delicious,” Martin said, taking the last bite of his tart. “David’s right. Every social function partakes of a shared premise. Christians share the belief that Jesus was the divine Son of God. But the belief rests on a shared premise. Jews don’t share the premise, which makes it almost impossible to convince them.”
“And what is our premise, David?” Frome asked.
“That God is one. Adonoy Echod.”
“But there’s a prior one, isn’t there?” Frome persisted.
“Prior?” Martin asked.
David felt a cold chill touch his heart.
“Definitely. Prior.”
“God,” David said softly.
“Exactly.”
Mel Klein, increasingly uneasy, changed the subject. “Did you all read about Jack Osner today? I know David gets the New York Times.”
“Haven’t looked at it today.”
“I’ve been avoiding mine,” Martin said.
“I read ours,” Lucy said. “I’m not impressed.”
“What is she not impressed with?” Frome asked.
“The fact that Jack’s been made Deputy Secretary of De fense,” Mel informed them. “He’ll be sitting in on Cabinet meetings.”
“I don’t see him there. Defense? He spent the war at a desk in Washington.”
“It makes sense,” Frome said. “He’s very close to the gentlemen in the Pentagon. I have no love for Osner, but I had to do a story on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I had some real trouble getting to them until I mentioned it to Osner. He waved his wand, and I saw them the following day.”
“Jack does things that way,” Mel said. “He’s a smart man.”
“He’s a pig,” Della said.
“Makes him fit for government,” Ed Frome commented.
“Oh, come on,” Mel scolded. “That’s no way to talk about him. It’s unfair.”
“Ask Shelly Osner how unfair. He beat the living daylights out of her.”
“Oh, no,” Martin said. “We haven’t seen Shelly lately, but we used to be close. I can’t imagine.”
“His kids won’t see him,” Della persisted. “They’re both away; the girl at college —”
“Hold on, please,” David said. “The Osners still belong to this congregation. They’re not selling their house, and they’ll be spending summers here. As for Jack, we’ll wait and see.”
“Speaking of premises,” Lucy said, “a prevalent one holds that apple pie was created by Martha Washington on an off day when she was not inventing ice cream. You know, as American as apple pie. Now this tart you are all praising so wisely is definitely European, and it might of course be argued this isn’t an apple pie. Although I think it is. However, apple pie is eaten in a good many countries. So much for the premise.”
“Nobody argues the truth of premises,” Martin said. “Only the usefulness.”
“Like our being the result of the premise that good is poor. We all want our minister to be good, therefore keep him on the edge of starvation.”
“Millie, we’re not on the edge of starvation.”
“Because Grandpa left me a trust fund. Not because of a minister’s wages.”
“Hear! Hear!” Lucy said.
“We’re not starving,” David reminded her.
“Still, it’s no path to riches,” Martin said. “Yet in a
way I find it comforting to accept the fact that I’ll never be rich, regardless of what happens and in spite of the trust fund.”
“Episcopal ministers do better,” Millie said.
“Not in this town. But what about your side of the street, David? You have three sects, so to speak, don’t you?”
“Not exactly sects or even divisions. Let’s say interpretations. The Orthodox Jew is for the most part a fundamentalist, accepting a literal interpretation of the Bible and living his life, to one degree or another, by a code of Jewish law called the Shulchan Aruch. The Conservative group accepts a great deal of Orthodox Judaism, but tempers it to modern life. For instance, many a Conservative Jew will eat ham in a restaurant but not at home. Others are indifferent in religious terms, but unwilling to take the step to Reform Judaism.”
“How big is the step?”
“Not very big, but qualitative. We try to do away with superstition and mumbo-jumbo and find an ethical response in religion. We try to go back to the simple worship that prevailed long, long ago, before the stultifying superstition of the Middle Ages and the Pale of Settlement in the czar’s Russia.”
“The Pale being,” Frome explained, “an area where Jews were allowed to live, there and nowhere else.”
“To me,” Mel Klein said suddenly, yet tentatively, “it’s the rejection of Orthodox Judaism. I think orthodoxy anywhere is a terrible thing.”
“All orthodoxy?” Millie wondered.
“All of it. My mother died when I was eight years old,” Klein said. “My people were immigrants, and like most immigrants they were Orthodox, and every day I had to go to an Orthodox synagogue to say the prayer for the dead. There would be fifteen or twenty old men at the morning service, and they teased me and tortured me with little stupid tricks, like giving me a glass of vodka and telling me it was water. I don’t know whether it was malevolent, but even at that young age, I realized that their devotion to prayer was apart from any sensitivity to the feelings of a kid who’d just lost his mother. After that time, I never set foot in an Orthodox synagogue again. I don’t pretend to judge Orthodox Jews on my experience as a kid in that one place, but after that, I began to watch every kind of orthodoxy. None of them are good — in my opinion. I don’t ask anyone to agree with me.”
