The Outsider

by Howard Fast

  It was just twelve days after this dinner which he gave for Herman Strauss that Mel Klein died. He passed away in the middle of the night, a victim of a massive coronary thrombosis. Dr. Henry Levine, living in Leighton Ridge, was the first to reach him; and almost immediately after that, the emergency rescue truck of the volunteer firemen arrived, but it was too late for oxygen or anything else. Dr. Levine called David at five in the morning, an hour after it happened, and he and Lucy drove to the Kleins’ home immediately. The Kleins had three children, all of them grown and out of college, one living in New York, a boy, and two girls out on the Coast, one a medical student, the other an actress. Della was talking to her son on the telephone when David arrived. She was a gray-eyed, round-limbed woman of forty-five, younger than her husband by twenty years, and quite beautiful in a very simple manner. She had light brown hair, streaked with gray and sun-bleached strands of corn color, cut in a simple pageboy style, and almost no make-up; and she displayed the easy manner of a woman totally secure in her relationship with her husband.

  Now that husband was dead. David had expected her to be utterly devastated by what had happened. He was surprised by her control and calm. “I’m so glad you’re here, David,” she said, embracing him. “I’ll have tears and hysteria later, alone. Right now, I must be controlled for a while. But you know, David, God gave us such love and companionship! How many people have that? I watch people grow old and fear death and become feeble. Mel missed that. I had twenty-seven years with one of the best human beings I ever knew. I had that.”

  Mel Klein’s grave was the eleventh grave in the little cemetery. Standing beside the open grave with Della and her children, David spoke the prayers and then whispered his own farewell to a thoughtful and kindly gentleman. Eleven times he had done this. This was the rabbi’s function so little discussed in the seminary, and almost everybody here, almost every corpse in every grave, had been someone he had known and touched. Strangely, it had not hardened him; and he supposed that was one of the great faults of his existence, that nothing hardened him.

  Jack Osner had come up from Washington to attend the funeral. It was bruited about that Osner was one of the men most trusted by the President. He sat in on Cabinet meetings; he was the direct link with the Pentagon; and if the fall election brought a Republican victory at the polls, Osner was certainly slated to be Secretary of Defense.

  The members of the congregation were impressed with the fact that he had come to the funeral. “But after all,” he said, “Mel and I put this synagogue together.”

  He also ordered and paid for a bronze plaque to be affixed to the wall of the synagogue hallway, bearing the names of the synagogue’s founding group, with Mel Klein’s name at the head of the list. “Of course,” he said to David, “it would make a better impression on the Gentiles if we had a plaque of members who had died in the war. But we can’t do that, since we didn’t organize until after the war. I got a sketch of the plaque. I want to show it to Della.”

  “I wouldn’t,” David said. “Not right now, Jack.”

  “Figure it might shake her?”

  “It might.”

  After the funeral, Mel and Della’s friends gathered at the Klein home. David felt that one of the few decent aspects of the modern way of death was the gathering to eat after the funeral. People brought food, and women in the kitchen arranged it, cooked it, served it. Food was the most ancient affirmation of life. Now the house, large as it was, filled up with friends of the Kleins and their children, and in the crowd Osner found David and said to him, “Can we find a quiet place to talk?”

  “Can’t it wait, Jack?”

  “I’m afraid not,” Osner said. “I have to get the five o’clock out of La Guardia, and that’s three hours from now. This is important, David.”

  “All right. Della has a little sewing room upstairs. It’s probably empty.”

  Perched on a small stool, his long, skinny legs drawn up in front of him, David nodded and said, “Okay, Jack. Let’s hear it.” Osner sat on the only chair in the room, uncomfortable, uncomfortable with the smallness of the room, the litter of sewing baskets, sewing machine, goods, scraps. Osner had gained weight, neck, jowls, and stomach.

  “You know, David,” Osner said, “I’m very close to the people at the Pentagon.”

  “So I understand.”

  “Well, it just happens that there’s an opening for Jewish chaplain número uno. That is top dog — for the entire United States Army. Full colonel, very respectable pay, makes what they pay you here look like the gross of a peanut vendor, and perks. My God, David, when you add up the perks, it amounts to what you couldn’t buy for a hundred thousand dollars a year. You get a limo — not just a car, but limo and driver, on call twenty-four hours a day, you want him three o’clock in the morning, you got him three o’clock in the morning. And that’s only the beginning. Special rental rate, giving it away, on a house in Georgetown that the army owns. Free travel to any corner of the world where our troops are stationed, and that’s a lot of corners, and if you slip Lucy and the kids in, no one asks questions. David, there is nothing like this. You want silk prayer shawls — order up a thousand. They’re in your office the next day. Anything. No one who hasn’t associated himself with the Pentagon can possibly imagine how a job like this pays off, not to mention the pleasure of wearing the old uniform again. Now, when I suggested your name, first thing they did was to order up your war record. Well, I heard things, but I never dreamed that you sported that kind of war record. Aces — absolute aces. It’s true that when they checked with the F.B.I. they found a different kind of a file, but I talked them out of that one. I told them that you were as loyal as any man in the U.S.A., and I carry enough clout to make them believe it. But I will say this — no more marches, no more demonstrations, no more letters to the New York Times. I wish to God this fracas in the South had never happened. You know, most of the big brass are old Southern boys, and it gets their ass up when they’re made out to be Nazis. Well, what’s done is done, and everyone’s shooting his mouth off today about how the nigger’s got to vote, and why not be in a position where he votes for our candidate instead of their candidate? So what do you say?”

  “You mean do I want the job, Jack? No, I don’t think so.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “No.”

  “David, David,” shaking his head, “a rabbi’s a rabbi. I understand that. But if you’re a rabbi, you go to whatever’s the top for a rabbi, and this is it. That’s the name of the game, David.”

  “Oh, I appreciate your thinking of me and extending yourself for me, Jack, but there’s no way I could take that job.”

  “Give me one reason,” Osner said.

  “Well, for one thing, I’m a pacifist. I believe that war as a means of settling a dispute or achieving a social end is sheer insanity.”

  “We all believe that, David. But do the Russians? Do we defend ourselves, or do we say to them, Come over and take it all?”

  “I don’t like the Pentagon.”

  “Come on. What’s to like or dislike? We got clients I went out of my way not to talk to. Their money talks to me.”

  “No, I couldn’t do it, Jack.”

  “David, I went out on a lot of limbs for you. I told them I had a package ready for delivery, and now you’re pulling the rug out from under me. That doesn’t sit well with me.”

  “Jack, I appreciate what you’ve done and I appreciate your thinking about me, but I can’t take a job simply because you feel it’s the right job for me.”

  “Right job? This is not a job; it’s a position, a post, a way of serving your country, a pension at retirement twice what you’re making now! Who the hell do you think you are!” His anger mounted. David had never seen him like this. “You’re a small-town rabbi making eight thousand dollars a year! A ditch-digger takes home more money than you do! And you sit there and look down your nose at me and tell me you’re some kind of fucken pacifist! Well, you have blown
it, buster!” And with that, he walked out of the sewing room, slamming the door behind him.

  David sat motionless on the little stool for a while after Jack Osner had left. There was a sewing table in the room, the sewing machine open for use, the foot of the machine clenching a seam on a tiny dress of printed cotton, a dress Della had been making for her year-old granddaughter. There was a sense of peace, of creativity and timelessness in the little room. David felt Osner’s anger even after his departure. It violated the place.

  Finally, David shook his head unhappily, and then left the room and went downstairs.

  “What happened between you and Osner?” Lucy whispered, pushing through the crowd of people to his side.

  “We’ll talk about it later.”

  Della was holding a baby in her arms — apparently her granddaughter, the child the dress was intended for — and she said, “Isn’t she beautiful, David?”

  “Very beautiful.”

  “Don’t go, please. Please stay.”

  “Of course. As long as you wish.”

  By nine o’clock that evening, everyone had left except David and Lucy, Eddie Frome and Sophie, and Della’s three children. The older daughter was upstairs, putting the baby to bed. The son sat with his mother, and his sister sat alone in a corner, silent and staring at the floor. Unexpectedly, Della said to David, “You don’t play pinochle, do you, David?”

  He was taken aback by the question, and he stared at Della a long moment before he shook his head. “No, I don’t.”

  “I haven’t lost my mind, David. Eddie and I were talking about Mel’s passion for pinochle. Mostly they played two-handed pinochle, which Mel told me was just a ghost of the game. They needed a third desperately, and Eddie would say, ‘Let’s ask the rabbi,’ and Mel would say, ‘You just don’t ask a rabbi whether he wants to make a third in pinochle.’”

  “No?”

  “Mel was right,” Frome said. “You don’t.”

  “I’m a rotten card player,” David said, “but why didn’t they teach you, Della?”

  “Pinochle? Good heavens, women don’t play pinochle.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s an antique game out of a male-dominated society.”

  “How can you!” the girl in the corner, Della’s younger daughter, cried out. “My father in his grave only a few hours, and you sit there talking like that.”

  “As if he were here,” Della said gently. “We must, you know. Otherwise, we forget too quickly.” She rose and went over to her daughter. “And, Joan, we must not forget.” The girl stood up and her mother embraced her, both of them weeping now.

  In their bedroom, a half-hour past midnight, Lucy said, “All right, tell me about Jack Osner.”

  “I was thinking about Della,” David said. “That’s a very remarkable woman.”

  “Which, I imagine, is why you’ve always been in love with her. You have, you know.”

  “Lucy, don’t do that.”

  “What amazes me is that with all your preaching about insight, you have so little of your own. Why don’t you admit how you feel about Della?”

  “Because I don’t feel that way.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Why do I do it? Wipe it out, please. Tell me about Osner.”

  Happy to change the subject, he told her all that Osner had offered.

  “Wow,” Lucy said softly, “that is a biggie, isn’t it? Chief of the whole works, the whole, entire United States Army.”

  “It’s not that big — chief chaplain in charge of Jewish chaplains, and this army is not precisely loaded with Jewish soldiers. We’re not back in ‘forty-two, when we had half a million Jewish soldiers in the army.”

  “Why just a colonel?”

  “That’s all it calls for.”

  “And, of course, you refused it.”

  “I had to.”

  “Why?” Lucy demanded.

  “You know why. You know how I feel about war.”

  “You didn’t feel that way in nineteen forty-two. You weren’t drafted. You enlisted, and when they made you a senior officer, you didn’t protest it.” He tried to interrupt, but she pushed on, “Just let me say it, David, once and for all. You may be a pure one hundred percent pacifist and you may hate war, but if it weren’t for you and millions of other kids in U.S. uniform, we might both be living under Hitler today, only we wouldn’t be living, we’d be dead. Tell me I’m wrong!”

  “I don’t know whether you’re wrong, Lucy, and that’s not the point here.”

  “What is the point? I know what a miserable shithead Jack Osner is, but he didn’t have to do this. He held out a hand to you and you spit in it.”

  “No, he didn’t,” David said softly. “He has to make points with the Pentagon wherever he can. I hate to say this, but for him to hand the Joint Chiefs of Staff a war hero with all the damned decorations they gave me, no less a Jew and a rabbi — that’s bonanza time for him. He’s Jewish, and don’t think they don’t know it, and if Nixon wins the election, Osner will be Secretary of Defense.”

  “David, I’m a rabbi’s wife in a congregation that pays you eight thousand dollars a year and a house to live in. This is nineteen sixty. You have been rabbi in Leighton Ridge for fourteen years. You are almost forty-four years old, and what do we have to show for it? I make my own clothes. I save pennies to have Mrs. Holtzman in to do dinner for a few guests, and we’re the only family in the congregation who doesn’t have a color television. Our car is falling apart — David, do you realize what Osner offered you? Have you ever been to Georgetown?”

  “I’ve been there, yes.”

  “It’s the best neighborhood in Washington. If the army offers us a house in Georgetown, it doesn’t come without servants. We both know the army. Not just a car, but a chauffeur-driven limousine. David, it’s like a Cinderella story — and the freedom to travel anywhere without cost, all the places we’ve talked about and dreamed of seeing and never saw. We can send our kids to college — David, it doesn’t mean you have to drop your principles by the wayside. Those kids in the service need you. They needed you during the war, you know that. Please — call Jack. Tell him you’ve changed your mind. He needs you as much as you need him.”

  David shook his head. “I can’t. Please don’t go on with this, Lucy. You know that I can’t.”

  “No, you can’t,” Lucy said. “If you could, it would put you in step with the rest of the human race and we can’t have that, can we?”

  “Lucy —”

  “Oh, the hell with it, David. Let me go to sleep. I’m tired.”

  Summer ended and fall came, but the gap between David and his wife was not closed or healed. After their talk that night, she never again referred to Jack Osner’s offer. The election day of 1960 arrived, and Nixon was defeated and John Kennedy became President of the United States. But those in Washington who prided themselves in knowing what was going on, and who was making it go on, did not package Jack Osner together with Dick Nixon. It was noted that Kennedy shook hands with Osner in front of the cameras, and Kennedy said, “Jack, suppose you call me Jack.” So it went in the seats of the mighty, but then Osner had not run for office. His law firm was known in Washington as power brokers. Members of such firms are never counted out.

  So Camelot came to the Potomac, and the torches that lit its golden glow were not unlike the torches that began to burn in Vietnam. It would be called Johnson’s War and Nixon’s War, and very few remembered that John Kennedy lit the first flames.

  In Leighton Ridge, David’s son, Aaron, faced his thirteenth birthday. David had never been very fond of the Bar Mitzvah, ushering a boy into so-called manhood, and he had been even less delighted with the Reform movement’s decision to extend the process to girls. He felt that the potlatch, the tidal wave of food and drink with which the proud parents inundated friends and relatives, was vulgar and unnecessary, and he would just as soon have erased the whole medieval ceremony. Yet, strangely enough, facing the Bar Mitz
vah of his only son, he was excited and proud, and he found himself looking forward to the day.

  At thirteen, Aaron Hartman was a tall, large-boned youngster, already five feet ten inches in height. He played center on the Leighton High basketball team, even though he was still in the junior high, and he was on the high school swimming team, with a preference for the free-style hundred meter. All of this made him a local hero of sorts among his peers and a kind of idol to his sister, Sarah, who might one day be a lovely woman, but who was now possessed of the same build as her brother — long, large bones, skin so heavily freckled that the untouched skin went unnoticed, five feet seven inches tall, with hair bleached by the sun into a variety of shades. Her fine features, well-shaped head, and bright blue eyes reassured her parents, but Sarah considered herself the ugliest living creature in Leighton Ridge and took refuge in her brother’s glory. As for Aaron, his long, ugly, bony face bothered him not at all.

  As far as David was concerned, he regarded his son with a mixture of love and bewilderment. Aaron was at ease with the world. It was a fine physical world where you did your thing, where you poured sweat, drank great quantities of bottled junk, ate enormous amounts of food without gaining any fat, and gave no thought to anything beyond Leighton Ridge. Times were when David took him climbing on the gentle slopes of the Berkshires. The boy was interested in what he was doing and not much else, yet he was no fool, his school grades were excellent, and when David and Lucy had taken the children with them on a trip to Israel, paid for by the congregation, Aaron fell into Hebrew as if he had been born to it, often translating for his father, whose seminary Hebrew was hardly up to the occasion. Both of his children reminded David of the kibbutz children they saw in Israel — the lack of pensiveness, the fierce physical self-possession, the indifference to the intellectual’s need to question things.