by Howard Fast
Yet facing his son now in the synagogue, completing the Bar Mitzvah ceremony with the blessing Baruch she-petarani, “Blessed is the Lord who has brought him to manhood,” David added softly, “Be wise, my son, because without wisdom, there is no goodness.”
After she kissed her son, Lucy kissed David, her eyes brimming with tears. She had made herself a yellow dress for the occasion, and she had done her hair in a new way, piling it on top of her head. Recognition came to David as if she were a stranger. She was a very comely woman indeed.
A few days after, alone with David, she said to him, “I don’t know how I can live without you, but I must. You know that, don’t you?”
He watched her without replying.
“Please don’t try to stop me this time, David. Please don’t.” And then she added, “I have to live, David.”
“Yes, you do,” he said.
•
PART SEVEN
1966
•
When they picked up the last passenger at Norwalk, Father Joseph Kelly, a very fat Paulist priest, David began to chuckle. Martin Carter’s old station wagon groaned and creaked with the added weight, and David apologized to Father Kelly. “Forgive me, Joe, I am not laughing at you. I was thinking of Jerome K. Jerome’s book Three Men in a Boat, and that broke me up.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I can’t even remember it properly. I think it was Bert’s umbrella.”
“It’s going to rain,” Rabbi Bert Sager said. “Do you know what you people are? You are something out of a Sholem Aleichem story, or divine or maybe not so divine fools out of Chelm, where they bring out all their sieves to gather rain water for the future. I bring an umbrella because it looks and feels like rain, and this rabbi of what they call Reform Judaism, here sitting next to me, tells me it reminds him of Jerome K. Jerome. Not bad, David, not at all bad, when I come to think of it. Tonight, my wife says to me, Bert, will you please tell me where you are going? She is a plain, intelligent, suffering wife of a rabbi who has a congregation in Connecticut, nothing so fancy as David’s here, but a simple Conservative congregation. So what should I tell her? Should I say to her, Sylvia, I am being picked up by two skinny Protestant ministers, a skinny rabbi, a plump Catholic priest — plump, Joe, it fits both of us? Never admit to being fat. Plumpness is a virtue that these desiccated Puritans cannot understand.”
“That’s kind of you, Bert. I’ve always thought of myself as being substantial.”
“Nice, too. Substantial. So they pick me up, I tell my wife, and we drive to New York to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Not inside — heaven forbid — but outside, where we have pledged ourselves to a four-hour vigil. That’s why we are loaded with candles. We will sit down cross-legged on the street and light our candles. Of course, since I haven’t been able to sit cross-legged since I was twelve, well, we’ll work that out. Anyway, we sit there four hours. I tell this to my wife. So what would Sylvia say?”
“There’d be a lot of truth in what she would say,” David decided.
“I don’t know,” Philip Simpson said. He was a Methodist minister from Westport. “It’s absolutely true that if I were to go down there alone and light a candle and sit myself down in the middle of Fifth Avenue, the police would pick me up and cart me away to Bellevue. And I suppose they’d be right to do so.”
“They’d be wrong to do so,” David said.
“Perhaps, perhaps. But there’ll be a hundred thousand people sitting there on Fifth Avenue with lighted candles, and the police have stopped the traffic and the Mayor has sort of given his blessing, and perhaps it will mean something, or change something.”
“Very little, I’m afraid,” Father Kelly said. “President Johnson is a hard man; unfortunately, a very stupid man, frozen in his lusts and his madness. Only the wise can be good. I picked that up from one of your sermons, Rabbi Hartman. I confess in all good faith that I steal from your sermons without conscience; but to go back to this man Johnson, there is no wisdom there. It’s a small matter to him if a hundred thousand people sit on Fifth Avenue through the night burning their hands with hot wax. By the way, how many of you thought to bring a candlestick?” He twisted to look around the car. “Ah, the two rabbis. You Protestants have lost touch with the magic of candles.”
“Not at all,” Martin said. “Drip a bit of wax onto the street, plant your candle there, and let it burn. Why hold it in your hand?”
“Touché!”
“None of that,” Kelly said. “This is the most interesting ecumenical foray in history. This is a nineteen fifty-two station wagon we’re riding in, isn’t it, Martin?”
“Fifty-one.”
“So God’s purpose becomes immediately explicit, since for this car to carry the five of us to New York is assuredly a miracle. Unlike Rabbi Sager, I have no wife to conceal my innocence or insanity from, but I do have my boss at the church, Father Flannigan, and I could hardly lie to him. The look he gave me was completely astonished. ‘Do you mean, Joseph,’ he said to me, ‘that you are driving to New York with a Congregationalist minister and a Methodist minister and two rabbis, and you will all sit down on Fifth Avenue opposite Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and hold lighted candles in your hands?’ ‘That is exactly what I mean,’ I told him, and then he says, ‘And why are you doing this strange thing?’ And I say to him, ‘Why, to stop the war in Vietnam. Why else?’”
“He didn’t forbid you?”
“Oh, no. No indeed. Of course, I can’t say what he was thinking. He’s a kind man.”
“He would have to be,” Rabbi Sager said.
“Of course you can miss the point,” David said. “It’s in the nature of our culture to see the cleric as an object of ridicule. He is tolerated as a sort of idiot survival of the past in a time where nobody believes in God very deeply, if at all. Yes,” nodding at Kelly, “you Catholic priests are a little better regarded, because you work harder at your mythology, though it’s not all wine and roses there either. But suddenly something has changed. For the first time in modern history, we’re involved in the leadership of a great antiwar movement, and that is absolutely a fact. There are thousands of ministers, priests, and rabbis joined together to stop this obscene war in Vietnam. And we do not give God’s blessing to our side. We cry out that it is wrong.”
“No doubt, no doubt,” Kelly agreed, “and if you can’t see the hand of God in that —”
“Where was the hand of God in the First World War when the fields of France and Flanders ran with enough blood to float a fleet and it was all blessed by our colleagues on both sides?” Simpson wondered.
“Let’s not get into one of those God’s will things,” Martin said. “What I’m doing is my will. My son, Joseph, is in Toronto, working as a carpenter and glad to get the work. When he evaded the draft and refused to go to Vietnam, Millie and I agreed with him that as a Christian he could not do otherwise. Suddenly, it had become very hard to be a Christian. As for Jews — well, it has always been hard to be a Jew. Rabbi Hartman’s son is in prison as a conscientious objector.”
The others were quiet then. David wondered whether they were praying.
There were not a hundred thousand people with candles burning, seated in the street opposite St. Patrick’s, but there were certainly half that number, and among them David sat and wondered, as he always wondered on such occasions, what possible good could come of his action. Lucy used to ask him that.
“It doesn’t matter. You do it,” he would say.
Why? Why? Lucy’s mind was filled with whys, as applied to David’s view of the world. As far as Lucy was concerned, it was the way it was and always had been and nothing would ever change it. People got what they deserved, not via faith or prayer or God, but through the more effective agency of sheer, unmitigated stupidity and greed.
“You see,” Father Kelly said to Rabbi Sager, “it did not rain. God looks after the small things as well as the large.”
“If you think about it,” Rabbi
Sager said, “you will recall that it never rains on Yom Kippur but very often on Saint Patrick’s Day.”
“I don’t believe this,” Martin said. “I just don’t believe what I hear out of the mouths of two grown men.”
Of course, David was thinking, it was Lucy’s intelligence, her sharp, incisive intelligence, that brought matters to a close. If she had been a foolish woman or a thoughtlessly pious woman, their marriage might have dragged on for a lifetime; but it was precisely because she could see no sense in what he did, no meaning or point or destination, that the marriage came to an end. That was basic; the amenities missing from her life were merely a necessary argument to herself.
Over five long years since she left him a second time and divorced him. It seemed incredible that so much time could have passed; empty time. And what did he face now? More and more emptiness.
“There’s the rub,” Rabbi Sager said. “Nobody wants to believe in a divine handle in the weather. Not anymore. Even myself.”
It was a very simple and, as they say, civilized procedure. Lucy had taken the children with her to California, and leaving them there with her mother, she had spent enough time in Reno to have an uncontested divorce.
This time, David’s world collapsed. He had heard it said that people who become sodden drunk may have little or no memory of what they do during the time, but his own memory of what happened was as clear as glass and as cold as ice. He was not a teetotaler. He would have a drink when the occasion warranted a drink, or two drinks or three, and during the war he had now and again become beer-drunk in the sad and lonesome way that kids do in a war. But this time, when a letter from Lucy informed him that the divorce was complete, that their small bank account was his, that he could visit his children when he pleased and work out any longer periods of visitation that he desired, that she would never fight him on any issue and that she would never turn the kids against him and that she still loved him and probably always would, he found his own existence to be more than he could bear. He took out a full quart bottle of Scotch whiskey, an unopened gift this Christmas past from Martin Carter, and he sat down with the whiskey and with a glass and proceeded to attempt to drink himself into insensibility.
Instead, with two thirds of the bottle in his stomach at two o’clock in the morning, he became very, very drunk. In that condition, he staggered out into the snow, the bottle in his hand, and made his way over the mile and a half of road that separated his house from the Carter house, pausing every now and then for another swallow of the whiskey. Considering what was in his stomach, his feat was a testimony to his physical make-up and his endurance. The snow was at least eight inches deep and still falling in fat, lazy flakes.
Under Martin and Millie’s bedroom window, he stopped and shouted, “Carter, you holy God merchant!”
There was no response. The white clapboard house and the white clapboard church stood alone in an expanse of snow-covered fields, defined in the moonlight by the dark blue shadows of the stone walls that divided them, walls raised there long, long ago by tight-lipped Connecticut farmers, specifying where their sheep would graze and where their wheat would grow. And now a drunken rabbi shouted into the cold wind, “Martin Carter, you and I have been — you and I — we, we have been accused of eschewing the life of language, which is what Lucy said! Lucy was my wife! She said I eschew the living language and she left me and took away my children! If I could only say she ripped me off with all her motherfucking smarts, she would not have left me alone in that shitpile we call our house! But I can’t say anything that means a damned thing anymore, and she knows it!”
At that point, the door opened, and Martin, in a bathrobe, his feet in a flapping pair of galoshes, came out into the snow and took David by the arm.
“Come on inside, old friend,” Martin said.
“No.”
“You’re wet and cold and all you’re wearing is a shirt, and if you don’t come inside, you’ll be sick.”
“Good. I’ll die. It’s about time.”
“You won’t die. You’ll just be very sick, and your friends, who all have better things to do, will have to take care of you.”
“They don’t have to. Who’s asking them to?”
He took the bottle from David’s hand. “Did you drink all this?”
“You bet your ass I did.”
“Was it full?”
“You bet your ass it was.”
“You wouldn’t want me to get sick, David?”
“Oh, no. No way. You’re my friend, Martin. Of course, you could be some motherfucken S.S. man, trying to come off like some kind of Jew-loving priest —”
“David, stop that! You’re drunk and you don’t know what in hell you’re talking about, and now you’re coming inside with me.” There was a swallow of whiskey left in the bottle, and as David tilted it up, Martin grabbed it and flung it into the snow.
“That’s enough!”
“You’re shouting at me,” David whimpered.
“You are damned right I am!”
“I want to talk to Millie. Millie doesn’t hate me.”
Martin guided David into the house, into the kitchen, where Millie had a large pot of coffee perking. The kitchen was cold. Millie had a robe over her nightgown. “How is he?” she asked Martin.
“He is as drunk as any drunk I ever saw. He apparently put away a quart of whiskey.”
“He could die from that.”
“He has the constitution of a horse. He’s soaking wet. You start feeding him the coffee and I’ll find a dry shirt and a sweater for him.”
A broken groan from David.
“Get him into the bathroom!” Millie cried.
Martin held him as David vomited into the toilet bowl. They were both lean men, but David was taller and heavier, and it was all Martin could do to keep him from collapsing onto the bowl. After he wiped him off with a wet towel, Martin somehow manipulated him back into the kitchen.
“Good and black?” he asked his wife.
“You bet.”
“Let’s pour it into him.”
“I hear that with this kind of thing, you have to walk them too. The alcohol is, in effect, a poison.”
“That’s right.”
They did both. They walked him and they poured black coffee into him, and by the time the first fingers of dawn touched the kitchen, Rabbi Hartman was sick, tired, red-eyed, and reasonably sober — sober enough to feel ashamed and miserable and guilty. “You always do it to those you love,” he mumbled. “I’m so sorry. And now I have to add insult to injury by asking for a ride home.”
“There’s a foot of snow out there,” Millie said. “And anyway, you have to have something in your stomach, so I’ll put up some eggs and toast. The children are all out of the house for years now, so it’s nice to have someone infantile to take care of.”
“Millie!” Martin cried.
“She’s absolutely right,” David said. “What a disaster I’ve turned into!”
“Nonsense. You’ve gone through a divorce, which is one of the most awful things a sensitive person can experience, and for you, with the burden you carry, it’s worse than it is for most. But it’s not the end of the world and it’s not the end of your life.”
Millie put the eggs and toast in front of him. “Please eat this, David. I’m sorry for what I said.”
“You’re perfectly right.”
“No, I’m not. Now please eat this. You’ve had a terrible night.”
So it had been, a terrible, sick night, over five years ago, yet the taste of that night was still with him. It would always be with him, and even his relationship with Martin would never be quite the same.
“You don’t have to hold the candle in that little holder,” Martin whispered. “Put it on the pavement. I think Father Kelly is a bit of a nut.”
“Do you suppose we actually change anything?” David asked him. “Lucy never felt that we did. It was a bone of contention between us. When the cookbook she and Millie p
ut together was published, I saw a whole window full of the book in Westport. She said that at least she and Millie changed the way people cooked — at least somewhat. What do we ever change?”
“That’s a hard question to answer. In Vietnam, the Buddhist monks douse themselves with gasoline, sit down cross-legged, and set themselves on fire. I suspect the thinking is that the pain is so great, the horror so great, and the courage so great that it makes a plea for peace that must be heard.”
“But it isn’t heard and nothing changes.”
“Can we be sure, David? I sit here with this silly candle, and then I think about the song, it is better to light just one little candle than to sit and curse the dark. Well, that’s our only choice, isn’t it?”
“Yes, our only choice.”
There had been a lot of talk in the congregation after David’s divorce, and there had even been talk among some members of the congregation that he ought to resign; but nothing came of that. There was a minority group in the congregation who would have liked to rid themselves of Rabbi Hartman, but they were a minority and for the most part they kept their peace.Thebook of sermons, which was originally published in a German translation under the title The Outsider, had become a modest best seller in Germany; it was picked up in Holland and translated into Dutch and then into the Scandinavian languages. Its publication in England in the English language took place about a year after the German publication; and a year after that, David was approached by an American publisher. It was about this time that David received news of Herman Strauss’s death. He changed the name of the American edition to Two Silver Teaspoons and wrote the story of his evening with Herman Strauss as a preface to the American edition. Although the book was not destined to be a runaway best seller, it was expected to do very well indeed, and, what with the foreign royalties and the American publisher’s advance, his income was very substantial. For the first time in his life, David was freed from the niggling worries of poverty.
