The Outsider

by Howard Fast

  David joined her at the window. The rain had stopped, and the sun was rising against a thin tracery of clouds. The rain had stripped the great maples and oaks of their autumn leaves and spread a carpet of red and gold across the lawn.

  “How do you feel?” Della asked him.

  “Guilty and conscience-stricken, but otherwise pretty good.”

  “Let’s feed your guilt some breakfast, and then can we walk a little? I’d love that, David.”

  “If you wish.”

  “We’ll be seen, but the hell with them! Let them send their kids out to find husbands their own age.”

  “Ah, well. They tolerate a rabbi who is divorced, so I suppose they’ll tolerate a rabbi who sleeps around with married women.”

  “They tolerate a rabbi who’s brainless, which is what you mean. I’m not married women. I’m both single and singular, and I’m a widow and I’ve been a widow for six years.”

  After breakfast, they walked down a little dirt road behind Della’s house. Two rows of blazing red swamp maples enclosed the path until it rose up to the brow of a hill, where the view was open, rolling pastures and meadows beneath them, and to the north, vaguely visible, the foothills of the Berkshires. The air was pure and clean and full of October perfume, and the golden leaves on a little stand of white birches gleamed like jewels.

  “This is the most beautiful place on earth,” Della said.

  “Almost.”

  “Why almost?”

  “During the war, I flew into Casablanca, and as we were circling to land, I looked down and saw this enormous swimming pool. I don’t know what it was or who built it or why, but there it was. I was sitting next to a tough old regular army colonel, and I said to him, ‘That has to be the largest swimming pool in the world.’ He looked at me a moment, and then he said, ‘No, sonny, it is not. Maybe the second biggest, but not the biggest, because whatever it is, there’s something bigger or better somewhere.’”

  “That’s a nice story, David, and let this be the second most beautiful place on earth, but why on earth can’t you tell me that Lucy’s coming here to see your son?”

  “Divorce is a complex thing,” David said after a long pause. “It becomes more complex when you have a son in prison.”

  Its complexity surprised even David when Lucy called him the following week.

  “When are you coming in?” he asked her.

  “I am in. I’m at the Carters’.”

  “You’re where?”

  “At the Carters’. Millie picked me up at the airport. I’m staying only three days, and by Ben Franklin’s dictum, that’s permissible for a guest.”

  “But you could have stayed at the house. We have Aaron’s room, and Mrs. Holtzman stays here.”

  “David, darling, I don’t need a chaperone. I simply thought it would be better if we weren’t sleeping in the same house.”

  “Perhaps you’re right.”

  “And when do we see Aaron?”

  “Day after tomorrow. I’ll drive you over to Danbury, of course. Tell me about Sarah.”

  “Sarah’s healthy and lovely, and she started college two weeks ago, and Martin wants you to join us for dinner tonight. You will, won’t you, David?”

  His agreement was very civilized. Divorces were civilized these days. He was civilized. Martin and Millie were civilized. Lucy and Della were both civilized — and yet he felt so empty, so terribly empty. What did it add up to? The small house that his congregation had built for its rabbi was the coldest, loneliest place in the world. And his wife? He still thought about her as his wife, but she was gone and lost, and he felt very deeply that there was no way she could ever return to him.

  It seemed like only a moment ago that he had walked into the U.S.O. store on Broadway to have her greet him with that smile of hers. “Welcome, soldier — except that you’re an officer. There’s an officers’ club over on Forty-fourth Street, where you’ll be much happier.”

  “I don’t want doughnuts or coffee. I was watching you through the window. I want your name, address, and telephone number, and then I want a date.”

  “What? Are you some kind of nut, Captain?”

  “Possibly.”

  “And what’s that thing?” pointing to the Star of David on his blouse.

  “I’m a rabbi.”

  “You got to be kidding. And all that fruit salad?” pointing to the three rows of ribbon on his blouse.

  Did she remember? He tried to think of what he had said to that. He had not been in character that day. He was a diffident, shy young man, and standing out in the street, watching her through the plate glass window, he had rehearsed the speech he would make to her. Was he wrong in remembering the beginning as a very happy time? Twenty years was not so long ago, yet the world and attitudes of that time were gone forever.

  He tried to conquer and control his anticipation. After all, he had found another woman who was loving and who was concerned for him, and he had found in the single night with Della a kind of lovemaking and sexual exchange he had never dreamed of. He blamed only himself for not having experienced it with Lucy, but responsible or not, there were other roads to-happiness than a return to Lucy.

  Yet reason with himself as he might, he was still not prepared for the youthfulness of Lucy. He had not seen her since she went off to California a second time, a harassed and agonizing woman; he was not prepared for someone who, five years later, looked younger than he remembered her to be. She embraced him and kissed him, giving him no feeling that she was holding back, and she said warmly, “How good to see you, David. You look wonderful.”

  “You look wonderful,” he countered. “I’m losing my hair, and what I haven’t lost is almost gray. You’re not a day older.”

  “No pact with the devil. I work hard and enjoy what I do — which is something you’d hardly approve of,” she said quickly. “I’m a theatrical agent — an actor’s agent. The man I’m going to marry, Bob Greene, owns the agency. He’s divorced.” She got it all out very quickly, almost in a single breath. Martin was watching both David and Lucy intently, and as David spoke, he nodded slightly.

  “Of course, I approve of it,” David said. “Why not? I think it’s great that you’ve found yourself.”

  “Well, that’s putting it a bit loftily. I can’t say that I’ve found myself — not in the way that you and Martin use the expression, not in the way of having found a calling or some esoteric meaning to my life. The best I can say is that I earn a lot of money, more money than I ever dreamed I could earn, and I do put people to work and fight for better pay from people who can well afford to pay what we ask, and I’m lucky enough to have found a man who’s comfortable to be with.”

  “You’re happy, and that’s what matters,” David said.

  At dinner, she told them that she would be living in Beverly Hills. She had an apartment there, but after they were married, they’d look for a house. Beverly Hills was a glamour place. They all felt somewhat abashed.

  “Here, nothing much changes,” David said.

  “Not so, not so,” Martin put in. “David is becoming quite famous.”

  “Martin!”

  “Well, not as famous as some, but more famous than others. His book is a real phenomenon — just keeps selling — and he’s asked here and there to speak, and believe it or not, there was a piece in the New York Times about the rabbi of Leighton Ridge, practically the first time we’ve come to the public’s attention since the Battle of Leighton Ridge was fought here in seventeen seventy-eight —”

  “As a matter of fact,” David said, interrupting Martin, “there’s a lot more coming out of Leighton Ridge than the mouthings of one desiccated rabbi. The New Yorker sent Eddie Frome to Vietnam, and he’s published an absolutely brilliant analysis, and Mike Benton has a hit play on Broadway, and everyone says it’s number one for the Pulitzer Prize.”

  “I know all about Mike’s play,” Lucy said. “Bob’s his West Coast agent. But he can forget about the Pulitzer Prize
. They won’t even give used carbon paper to an ex-red.”

  “Then maybe they’ll give it to Freddie Sims. He’s in our congregation,” Millie said, “and his play finishes its fourteenth week on Broadway.”

  “You must know we’re being silly,” Martin said. “Instead of urging Lucy to tell us about a fascinating business that she’s become a part of, we’re competing like a bunch of kids. I, for one, would like to know exactly what she does. I have only the vaguest notion of what a theatrical agent is.”

  Relieved, David listened to Lucy’s explanation of how she found jobs for actors, of the thousands of actors who lived at a starvation level, of the vast sums paid to stars, and of how the agent took his commission. Lucy sparkled with animation now that she was engaged with the new life she had chosen, and David was able, for perhaps the first time, to watch her very objectively. The last strings binding them together were being cut without his ever knowing that they were cut. She was truly a delightful, intelligent, and attractive woman, but he had lost any desire ever to be her husband again.

  Later, while Millie took Lucy upstairs to prepare her room for the night, or as an excuse to give Martin an opportunity to be alone with David, the two men sat down in Martin’s tiny study and sipped brandy. Martin lit his pipe and observed David with interest.

  “You always surprise me,” Martin said.

  “What did you expect?”

  “I was worried. David, that’s a remarkable woman.”

  “I meet remarkable women everywhere. That’s either my fortune or misfortune.”

  “Keep her as a friend. Our curse is that we’re joined to so few others, and from what she says, your daughter will remain in California.”

  “It’s only a few hours away by plane.”

  “She and Millie are very fond of each other. My wife doesn’t make friends easily, David.”

  “The whole world is spread so thin. I wonder how it was when it took two days to go from Leighton Ridge to Danbury.”

  “Not better, I think. But who knows? How’s Aaron? How is he taking prison?”

  “How does anyone take prison?” David wondered. “He’s an interesting boy, which I suppose is another way of saying he’s a strange boy. He appears to have no anger, and he tells me that he feels prison is a valuable experience. I think I would feel it as a deadly and terrible experience. But of all the people in our lives, I sometimes feel that those we know least are our children.”

  “And perhaps those they know least are their parents.”

  “Yes, that too.”

  Lucy and Millie came into the room now, and Lucy looked about her with pleasure. “What we don’t have much of out on the Coast is taste. Nothing like this little room could exist out there, no hand-hooked rugs, no pegged floors, no charming eighteenth-century furniture.”

  “Come on,” Martin said, “I’ve seen this room in the movies lots of times. Also, no below-zero temperature, no snow, no frozen plumbing.”

  “And I’ve been so absorbed in my own misery over Aaron that I never asked you about Ellie and Joe. Did she ever marry the doctor?”

  “No, that fell through. As for Joe, he’s reasonably happy,” Martin said. “He has a job as a carpenter in Toronto and he’s found a girl he likes —”

  “But can he come back — I mean when all this insanity is over?”

  “It will never be over,” Millie said hopelessly.

  “We brought him up as a Christian,” Martin said. “We taught him to comprehend and to live by the literal meaning of Christ’s words, to do no violence to any human being. My people came here over three hundred years ago because they found a cruel and mindless government intolerable. He has made the same choice, and I can only respect it.”

  “But this is our place,” Millie protested. “My father’s people have been here in Connecticut for generations.”

  “Still, we’re outsiders — just as David and Lucy are. That’s our curse — or our blessing.”

  “I could live without such blessings,” Millie said.

  “Someday he’ll come back,” Martin said. “Everything changes, and this will change too. The awful tragedy is that thousands of kids they are sending over there to Vietnam will never come back — except in body bags.”

  Driving toward Danbury Prison two days later, Lucy asked David, “Do you agree with Martin? Do you feel that his son was right in going to Canada? Aaron wouldn’t have to be in prison. He could have gone to Canada.”

  They had been riding in silence for the past ten minutes or so, David without thought at the moment, utterly enchanted by the explosion of fall colors in the Connecticut countryside. No matter how often he witnessed the miracle of the turning of the leaves, the sudden change of a green vista into a wild, beautiful riot of gold and red and orange and yellow, he could not become blasé about it. It was always new, unexpected, and improbable; and instead of answering Lucy, he said, “Don’t you miss this? I don’t think I could go years without seeing it.”

  “What?”

  “I meant the colors.”

  “Did you hear a word I said? I was saying that Aaron didn’t have to go to prison. He could have gone to Vancouver on the coast. There are hundreds of American kids there who fled the draft.”

  “I didn’t tell him what to do, Lucy. He did what he wanted to do.”

  “Did you ever tell him anything?” she said with irritation.

  “We’ll see him in a little while. Until then, can’t you just relax and enjoy the fall colors? I’m sure you haven’t seen them for years.”

  “You’re wonderful, David. You’re absolutely wonderful. We’re driving to Danbury Prison to see my son, who has been locked up like a common criminal, and all you can think of are these goddamned fall colors. I don’t give a damn about the colors! I can only think that those bastards may never let my son go. They can keep him there forever.”

  “They can’t keep him there forever. You’re letting your fears run away with you, and this is still a country ruled by law — at least inside our borders — and in eight months he’ll be released to begin a work program.”

  “Yes, and what does that mean? A chain gang somewhere?”

  “Probably Danbury Hospital, where he’ll do whatever has to be done. The point is, I think, that when we see him, we shouldn’t lay our own problems on him. He has enough of his own.”

  “That’s not what I meant to do.”

  “I know.”

  “Only if he had gone to Canada —”

  “Lucy, Aaron would not go to Canada, and he would not label himself a pacifist. He simply took the position that the war in Vietnam was unjust and violated every principle of his belief. They had to send him to prison. For my part, I would have done anything, said anything, to keep him out of that butchery. You know that.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’ll be very happy to see you.”

  “I know.” She leaned over and dropped her head against his shoulder. “I’m so tired, David, so damned tired. I was all right, not seeing you. In five years, I was able to blur things, what you looked like, what our life here had been, and then seeing you loused it all up. I can’t be married to you, I can’t — and I love you so damned much. I can’t live in this place. I feel choked here, with all your beautiful colors, closed in and choked. Everything’s too small. Bob and I have a little place at Malibu, and when we drive back to Los Angeles, five minutes from the house we’re in Malibu Canyon, with its great, towering mountains — no, it’s not that. It’s not the scenery. That’s stupid. It’s just the way you and Martin take on the world as some kind of personal responsibility. Well, it’s not your responsibility — not yours or anyone else’s. You want to know what the world is? I can tell you that. The world is a shitpile. The world is a conglomeration of idiots who let themselves be ruled by a maniac like Lyndon Johnson and who go out periodically and slaughter each other. You know what they call these people in the movie business — the shit-kickers. That’s what the world is, the shit-kickers
and the mental slobs. No one can change it. You and Martin can’t change one damned thing, and you stumble through life with all your faith in a God who doesn’t even exist, and what you lose is life itself—” Her voice broke and she burst into tears. “I love you,” she said. “I always loved you, and it’s no damned good.”

  David pulled the car over onto the shoulder of the road.

  “We’ll be late,” she whimpered.

  “Visiting goes on until three, and it’s only nine-thirty now. Come on, baby. You’ve fallen into a deep hole of emotion, and what else could you expect? We haven’t seen each other for years. You’ve been away from Leighton Ridge for years.”

  “David, why don’t you yell at me? Why don’t you tell me what a bitch I am?”

  “Because you’re not — and because I love you.”

  “Oh, David,” she sobbed, “you do, don’t you, and I love you, and it’s no use, is it?”

  “Whatever use you want to make of it. We’ll never live together again, but we have two kids that tie us together. We can love each other. It’s better than hating each other or being indifferent to each other.”

  She took some tissues from her purse and dabbed at her eyes. “What do my eyes look like, David?”

  “Very nice.”

  “You’re the dearest man.”

  “Well — at times. I can be pretty nasty.”

  “You?”

  “At times. How do you feel now?”

  “Much better. I had to get that out of me. I could go to jail — believe me, I could if I had to — but to see your kid go through it is a thousand times worse. And he didn’t do anything. All he did was refuse to kill people.”

  The guard at the entrance to Danbury Prison inspected Lucy’s purse. She had a roll of Life Saver mints. “I wouldn’t try to give him those,” the guard said.

  “It never occurred to me.”

  David and Lucy, each of them, had their hands stamped, an invisible mark on the back of the hand. “That’s to keep us from switching clothes with desperate characters like Aaron,” Lucy said. “I think they get all their ideas from the movies.” They were waiting in the very large visiting room, already filled with prisoners and their visitors. A guard brought Aaron to them, a tall, long-limbed, lean young man, nineteen years old, and so much like his father that Lucy caught her breath in surprise. She had not seen him in months, and she had created in her mind a vision of prison clothes, a bowed head, and a shambling gait. Instead, she saw a sunburned young man in blue jeans and a blue work shirt. He embraced her in a bear hug, and then, unexpectedly, embraced David too.