by Howard Fast
“Even if that’s true, it’s too late.”
“Why?”
“She’s gone.”
“David, David, get on a plane and go out there.”
“I can’t.”
“You must. I love Lucy, but she’s crazy. She’ll ruin her life and yours and your kids’.”
“I can’t force her.”
“David, get on a plane and go out there. That’s all I am going to say. We have meat loaf, poor parish meat loaf. Martin!” she called. “We’re eating in five minutes.”
David stayed awake half the night, thinking, planning, talking to himself, arguing with himself, sleeping finally out of sheer exhaustion. He didn’t get to his office at the synagogue until after ten, and when Mrs. Shapiro came into his office with a list of his calls, he brushed them aside and said, “I’m flying out to California this afternoon, Mrs. Shapiro. My suitcase is packed at home. Reserve a ticket as close to two o’clock as possible. That will give me time to get to Idlewild. Can you drive?”
“Of course I can drive. I drive here every day. I think it’s wonderful you should go see your wife and children, but what about Friday night service?”
“Call Mel Klein. He’ll lead the service. I’ll drive my car to Idlewild. You come with me and drive the car back.”
“I’ll get lost. I’ll never find my way back.”
“You’ll find your way back. Grown people who get lost in cars are always found. Meanwhile, reserve the tickets. Round trip for me, one way from California to Idlewild for my wife and the children.” He tried to say it casually and to feel casual about it, but inside he was sick with doubt and fear. He had split himself in two, and the part in motion and action was shredding every fiber of the part that was David Hartman.
He felt that all the way out to Idlewild, with Mrs. Shapiro reminding him, “You have the Kaplin Bar Mitzvah. That’s a week from Saturday, which is ten days. Will you be back in ten days, Rabbi Hartman? Do you know, you didn’t even give me a forwarding address or a telephone number. You know where your mother-in-law lives, but I don’t. Maybe you don’t. What should I tell Mikey Kaplin? Or his mother? She gets hysterical.”
“Santa Barbara.”
“Where is Santa Barbara? I can’t just say Santa Barbara. What do I do, call Information and ask for Santa Barbara?”
“Please, Mrs. Shapiro, don’t panic,” thinking that he was sufficiently panicked for both of them. “My mother-in-law’s name is Sally Spendler. You could get that from Information. In fact, when we get to the airport, I’ll write it all down for you.”
“Oh, my God!”
“What’s that, Mrs. Shapiro?”
“You got a wedding. The Silverman wedding. I forgot. God help me, I’m getting like you, Rabbi.”
“The wedding is a week from Sunday. I’ll be back. If not, call Rabbi Bert Sager in Norwalk, and he’ll do it.”
“Suppose Rabbi Sager has a wedding from his own congregation?”
“In September?”
When they reached the airport, David was so involved with Mrs. Shapiro’s problems that he momentarily forgot his own. After the airplane took off, he began to reconstruct his miseries, and he brooded and worried over them the whole seven hours to Los Angeles.
However, by the time he reached Los Angeles, his doubts and worries faded into the excitement of knowing that he would see Lucy and the children in a few hours. It was only ten days since they had left Connecticut, but it seemed like an eternity. Mrs. Shapiro had booked him onto a one o’clock flight, which meant that he had no time to do anything but make a mad rush for the airport, and the plane landed at five o’clock Los Angeles time.By six o’clock, David was in a rented car, driving north to Santa Barbara, guiding himself by frequent consultations with his road map. At eight-fifteen, he drove slowly up Acacia Road, looking for Number 432, the house Lucy’s mother had rented. When he found it, 432 reminded him of nothing so much as the big beach houses in Far Rockaway, where he and his mother had occasionally visited some obscure relative. It was covered with shingles stained dark brown; it had a porch around two sides; and the door had a stained glass panel.
The last glimmer of twilight had faded. Lights twinkled through the stained glass panel. David rang the bell, and Sally Spendler opened the door, looked at him, cried out in surprise, and then folded him against her ample bosom, whispering, “Thank God you’ve come. She’s lonely and miserable, which she deserves. Why, why, why did you let her do it?”
Against this, Lucy’s voice, “Mother, who is it?”
Sarah saw him and screeched, “It’s Daddy!”
Sally let go of him, and the two children came running. He dropped onto his knees and embraced both of them. Never an embrace like this before. He looked up, and Lucy was standing in the hallway, staring at him. Then he let go of the children and stood up and walked to her and kissed her. “David, are you hungry?” her mother said quickly. Lucy continued to stare at him without saying a word.
“Absolutely. I am starved.”
“Then come into the kitchen and let me feed you.”
“I’ll put the kids to bed,” Lucy said abruptly. Both children protested so loudly that Lucy gave in and allowed them fifteen minutes in the kitchen while their grandmother warmed food for David and then set a heaped plate in front of him. The children chattered away about their plane flight to the Coast, their school — which they disliked — and their rooms upstairs, which, according to them, were always too hot. When Lucy finally led them off to bed, her mother said to David, “I’m going up to my room too. You talk to her. What on earth happened between you two?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, it’s time you did know. She hasn’t smiled since she got here, so I hardly think she’s the happiest woman on earth. And for heaven’s sake, don’t let her put you on the couch. You’re married to her, and her bed is wide enough for two.”
A few minutes after Sally left the kitchen, Lucy entered and informed David that she had made up a bed on the couch.
“It’s ten o’clock,” David said, his voice rising, “and I don’t usually go to bed at ten o’clock, and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to sleep on any damned couch, and just who the hell do you think you are, coming in here like this and telling me you made a bed on the couch!”
“Then I think you’d better go and find some other place to spend the night.”
“No way. I’m here. Right here, today, tomorrow — as long as you’re here and as long as the kids are here.”
“You mean that?”
“I mean it,” he said.
“What about the synagogue?”
“They’ll find another rabbi.”
She sat down at the kitchen table and put her face on her arms.
“What are you doing?”
“Crying,” she mumbled.
“Why? Because I came here?”
“Because everything’s all fucked up.”
“It always has been. As you told me so often, that’s the nature of life on earth.”
She raised a tear-stained face and said, “Funny thing is, I’m glad you came. I hate it here.”
“How about me?”
“I missed you.”
“Will you come back?”
She hesitated; then she nodded. “All right. I’ll have to make arrangements.”
“I have the tickets — for you and the kids.”
“What?”
“I figured I’d just stay here until you came.”
“That’s sneaky.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“I never thought you were sneaky — like this whole scenario tonight. I always thought you were such a damned saint. Oh, the hell with it. We talk too much. Let’s go to bed.”
“On the couch?”
“No, it’s too narrow. My bed.”
“Your bed. Sure.”
•
PART SIX
1960
•
David had never been to the Deep So
uth before, and in some ways it was the most alien place he had ever seen. The heat was different from any heat he had known, the air heavy and turgid, the jack pines wavering and deformed as the heat and the air distorted the image.
A little while ago the few hundred people behind him had been singing, “We shall riot, we shall not be moved. We shall not, we shall not be moved. Just like a tree that’s standing by the water, we shall not be moved.” But now the singing had stopped, and they walked quietly. The heat seemed to be increasing. Under his suit jacket, his shirt was soaking wet, and a veritable host of insects, apparently attracted by the odor of perspiration, helped to make life even more miserable.
The march was led by three men. In the center was the Reverend Marchand Jones, a tall Baptist preacher, deep black in color and possessed of a booming magnetic voice. On his right hand was Martin Carter, his clerical collar wilting, his face pink, his hair still thick but almost entirely white, a transition that had taken place over the past half decade and that made him look somewhat older than his fifty-five years. On the Reverend Jones’s left hand was David Hartman, tall, thin, balding, and a bit stooped already in his forty-fourth year. The Reverend Jones would have nothing else but that David should lead the march with him. He had known very few rabbis, and to have one here with him today gave him a sense of biblical validity. Martin was also a first for the Reverend Jones — the first Congregationalist he had known, and this joined early America to the biblical stance, and when the Reverend Marchand Jones saw eight state troopers, standing shoulder to shoulder, legs spread, blocking the road from side to side, long riot clubs cradled in their hands, and behind them a dozen more troopers and cars with flashing lights, he said to David and Martin, “Just let me handle this, please. I know these folks.”
David nodded, wondering whether he was not getting too old for this kind of confrontation with danger.
“Morning, Reverend,” one of the troopers said.
“Cap’n Queen,” Jones whispered to David, spreading his arms for the march to stop, about twenty feet from where the troopers stood. “Morning, Cap’n.”
“Always know you as a law-abiding citizen, Reverend.”
“That’s what I am, Cap’n, law-abiding.”
“Well, no, sir. I got to say you are not, Reverend. You are leading a parade without no permit for a parade. You are blocking a public thoroughfare. You are creating a disturbance and you are fostering a public nuisance.”
“Good heavens, Cap’n, how can we be doing all that when what you see here is just a few people going into town to register to vote?”
“Reverend, you got maybe three, four hundred people there in the road behind you. Now what I want you to do is to turn around, just nice and quiet and peaceful, and go home.”
“We can’t do that, much as we’d like to.”
“Why not?”
“Because we told these good folks behind us that we would lead them into town to register to vote.”
“Now, Reverend, you know we ain’t going to register no niggers and we ain’t going to vote no niggers, so don’t try to con me. Who are them two white men you got with you?”
“Well, this one here’s the Reverend Martin Carter, who is a Congregationalist pastor up there in Connecticut, and this here on the other side of me is Rabbi David Hartman, and he is also from Connecticut.”
“Well, you two are a long way from home. I sure as hell don’t know what a congrega — whatever the hell it is, and we don’t like Jews down here, not one bit. So I’m going to give the three of you one minute to disperse and start clearing away that mob behind you, and after that, we are going to do the clearing away ourselves. One minute, gentlemen.”
“Well, what do you think?” the Reverend Jones asked his two clerical companions.
“We must stand our ground,” Martin said.
“A matter of principle,” David said, thinking at the same time of how much grief those four words had caused Martin and himself, “but keep your hands over your head, Martin.”
“So long, so slow,” the Reverend Jones said.
The minute up, the troopers advanced toward them, holding their riot clubs in front of them; and then, with a sudden rush, the troopers were on them. David tried to protect his head with his hands, and that was the last thing he remembered until he opened one eye and found the road an inch away, warm against his cheek, with a small puddle of blood almost bubbling with the heat of the road. Someone was pulling at his shoulder, and a voice said, “Come on, Rabbi. You just got yourself a tap on the head.” They helped him to his feet. He felt a trickle of blood running down his cheek, and he took out his handkerchief to stop it. Aside from about a dozen of the black people who had been in the march, and who were now sitting on the road and nursing head wounds, and one other who was lying there unconscious, there were only the Reverend Jones and Martin. Martin had a huge lump on his head that was turning blue. The Reverend Jones had been badly beaten, and he was sitting on the road, his head in his hands, while two of his parishioners, ladies both, dressed in white choir costumes, tried to comfort him.
“He needs a doctor,” David told one of the troopers. “Can’t you see that he needs a doctor?”
“He’ll get one in jail.”
“He should be taken to a hospital, not to jail.”
“Rabbi, you just be a quiet Jew or we’ll put you in a condition for a hospital.”
Tugging his sleeve, Martin whispered, “Let it be, David. They’re angry now. Let it cool down. Are you all right?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have some scalp cuts and some swelling. Does it hurt much?”
“It hurts. How about you?”
“Terrible headache. I’m a bit dizzy.”
They were driven into town in one of the squad cars. “Separate but equal,” the driver told them. “We don’t put niggers and white folks together, even when they break the law together.”
“Where are you taking us?”
“Jail, Rabbi. Jail.”
“We need a doctor, both of us.”
“Old Jake, down at the jailhouse, he’s fixed up worse injured parties than you two gentlemen. Just don’t worry about it.”
He was right about that part of it. At the jailhouse, they were put in a cell which they had to themselves, even though it had four beds in it, and Jake came in with a first aid kit. He washed out the scalp and facial cuts with peroxide and taped dressings on them, and he gave Martin a cold wet towel to hold against a large bump on his head. Jake was a man in his middle fifties with an enormous beer belly, a totally bald head, and blue eyes that blinked nervously and rapidly. “I hear you are a rabbi,” he whispered to David, selecting him for the absence of a clerical collar.
“That’s right.”
“Now I don’t like a nigger-lover no better than the next man, but I am going to help you. You know why? Because my Grandma Sadie, she was Jewish, and blood is thicker than water. I’m going to telephone Professor Byron Jackson down at the State University. He’s the head of the law school, and when he hears what happened, he’ll be here in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.”
“How soon is two shakes of a lamb’s tail?” Martin asked him.
“Maybe this evening. Maybe tomorrow morning.”
“I was going to ask for the customary telephone call, to which, as I understand these things, we’re entitled. Although maybe you’d better make the call,” he said to David, “because when Millie hears what we’ve gotten into, she’ll be so mad she may just decide to let me stay here and rot.”
“You know she wouldn’t.”
“Now you two listen,” Jake said. “You was brought here by the troopers, but this is Sheriff Benton’s place, and he ain’t going to let you get no Yankee lawyer down here until your faces look more human, and that will be maybe a week. So you better let me call Professor Jackson.”
“Where’s the Reverend Jones?”
“Got him over in a nigger cell. But I fixed him up same as you. H
e’s all right, but we don’t mix the races here.”
“I think you’d better call Professor Jackson.”
He didn’t come that night. David and Martin were served a watery oxtail stew with a thick chunk of bread, but neither of them had much appetite; as soon as they finished eating, the lights went off.
“Try to sleep,” Martin said.
“I’m afraid to lie down.”
“Pain?”
“Bedbugs.”
“How do you know?”
“After Pop died, we lived for a year in an apartment where we couldn’t get rid of them. I’ve had a horror of the little bastards ever since.”
“If they’re in your bed, they’re in mine.”
“No doubt.”
“What do I do about it?”
“Nothing,” David said. “Just thank your nice New England parents for raising you in a non-bedbug home.”
About an hour went by, and then Martin asked softly, “David, you asleep?”
“Not so you could notice.”
A few minutes of silence after that, and then Martin said, “David, did you ever lose your faith?”
“Most interesting question,” David replied, after a long moment. “The answer is yes.”
“Oh? Did it return to you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe some of it, different.”
“Well, how do you manage?”
“I might ask how you manage, Martin?”
“Yes.”
“When did it happen?” David asked him.
“Probably differently from what happened to you. I could never really swallow the virgin birth. Somehow, I managed the divinity of Jesus, but then that collapsed. Yet I love the story, the Christmas story, the birth of the Christ Child, and all the rest of it. But then I was on a TV show with a Paulist priest who had a lot more brains that I had, and I extolled the glory of Christ’s death, dying for the salvation of man, and this priest, who had been a chaplain during the war, like yourself, was just enraged by what I said. He said that only Christ’s life had meaning, that his death was a filthy, bloody horror, and that no death is glorious, and that we are fed that rotten lie so that we will support war. That was when it snapped.”
