“Nothing to it, Mr. Segal,” said Maltzman earnestly. “You’re called up to the Reading of the Torah and you pronounce a blessing. The Bar Mitzvah kids chant it in Hebrew. But you don’t have to chant it. Or if you were willing, I could arrange for the cantor to teach you. And even if you don’t know how to read Hebrew, we have it transliterated in English. Or you could even say it in English. Then after the portion is read, you say another blessing, and we could work that the same way, and that’s it. Of course, normally the Bar Mitzvah boy chants the portion from the Prophets, too. Hell, some of them run the whole Reading service. Kind of showing off, you see. But it’s not necessary. Believe me, the whole thing’s a pipe.”
“Is yours the only synagogue in town, Mr. Maltzman?” asked Mimi.
“That’s right, Mrs. Segal, and all Jews in the community belong, all that have been living here for some time. Of course, there are some families that are new, and maybe not a hundred percent sure they’re going to remain on account of their jobs, but those who’ve settled here, practically all of them belong. You say the word, and I’ll make arrangements with the rabbi and all.”
Ben Segal looked doubtfully at his wife, and when she nodded brightly, he said, “All right. Count me in.”
“Swell,” said Maltzman. “And I’ll get to work on that lot on the Point right away.”
11
In the dining room of the Agathon Yacht Club, one could order a cocktail, but only with dinner. And while you could linger over coffee and a brandy afterward, the house committee did not like you to linger too long. During the sailing season, the dining room was busy and there were apt to be people waiting for a table. In the off-season, the waiters resented having to wait overlong to clean up.
There was the lounge, of course, but it was on the formal side—a room of long windows curtained and velvet draped, of rugs and carpets, of sofas and armchairs in satin and brocade, of highly polished mahogany tables, with silk-shaded lamps. It was where you met your guests and chatted for a few minutes, just long enough for them to be impressed, before ushering them into the dining room, or down to the dock to your boat. Mostly women sat there and had tea or coffee brought to them.
For serious drinking, or for the long pointless conversations that killed an evening, there was the bar, and it was masculine territory. It was not forbidden to women, but by tacit agreement they never went there. It was a bare room with glaring ceiling lights that cast pools of light on the bare gray battleship linoleum that covered the floor. The furniture consisted of half a dozen round cigarette-scarred wooden tables, each surrounded by several captain’s chairs. Against the wall was a small bar, little more than a high counter, behind which were shelves of bottles, a small refrigerator and a sink.
The decor, or lack of it, was a holdover from Prohibition days. The feeling then had been that while it was not necessary that drinking be surreptitious, it would be brazen to do it in luxurious comfort. With repeal, and periodically since, there were suggestions that the room should be refurnished, something on the order of leather armchairs and knotty pine paneling and sporting or sailing prints, but the members who used it most resisted stoutly, perhaps through fear that if it were spruced up and redecorated, women might be attracted to it.
There were no waiters, only the barman. If it was not busy, he might in response to a nod bring over a refill, but usually you got your drink at the bar and carried it over to a table. Thursday was usually an off night at the bar, which is why Jordon chose it for his weekly visit. He did not like crowded bars, full of the boisterous din of well-lubricated good fellowship. He preferred the company of his old cronies, people he was used to, with whom he could talk sensibly, even seriously and philosophically, or sit with them in pleasant silence if the mood so moved them.
Although others would probably drift in later, only one table was now occupied, and as he waited for his drink to be poured, Jordon noted with satisfaction that of the four men seated around it, two were Thursday night regulars. There was old Dr. Springhurst, the retired rector of St. Andrew’s Episcopal, silver-haired and distinguished-looking in his Roman collar and gray flannel suit. As an avowed atheist, Jordon got a special pleasure in arguing religion with him. The other was Albert Megrim, a stockbroker and one of the selectmen of the town, with whom he liked to talk politics. Megrim was a stoutish man, with a round face surmounted by thin hair precisely parted in the middle. He always wore a dark conservative business suit and a white shirt with a bow tie, even on hot summer nights.
The other two at the table, Jordon knew only casually. Jason Walters, a corporation lawyer, was a tall, craggy man, who went in for vigorous sports and made a fetish of keeping fit. Jordon noted that he was wearing a sweat suit and sneakers and was probably going to top off the evening with a fast game of squash. The fourth man, by far the youngest of the group, not yet forty, was Don Burkhardt, a partner in a firm called Creative Engineers Incorporated, which went in for such diverse things as designing office furniture and layout, work-flow analysis and even preparing the graphics for the annual reports of corporations. Him, Jordon eyed with distaste as he waited at the bar for his drink to be poured. He did not like his carefully tailored Eisenhower jacket and jeans of carefully faded blue. He did not like his blond Afro hairstyle, a halo of curls framing his narrow face. And most of all, he did not like what he regarded as his radical ideas, by which he meant that Burkhardt made no secret of voting Democrat, and considered himself a liberal Democrat at that.
As they saw Jordon approach carrying his drink, the four men shifted a little to make room for him to insinuate another chair.
“How are you keeping, Ellsworth?” Dr. Springhurst greeted him.
“Tolerable, Padre, tolerable.”
“Gore is down at the pistol range, I suppose,” remarked Albert Megrim.
“No, I came myself this time,” said Jordon. “Larry is busy preparing for his Peter Archer silver exhibition. Why?”
“We were wondering about this new member he proposed. Is he a yachtsman? Has he got a boat?”
“Whatsat? New member? I’m on the committee and I don’t know anything about any new member.”
“His name has been posted, Ellsworth,” said Jason Walters. “Name of Segal.”
“It’s Ben Segal of Chicago,” said Megrim, “the one who’s taking over the Rohrbough Corporation.”
“Segal? Jew?” demanded Jordon.
Megrim smiled sardonically. “You can’t always tell these days. He’s not what I’d call a Jew, Ellsworth. I mean, he’s a financier. There was a long write-up on him in Business Week. A man like that is not a Jew.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” said Walters. “There’s a private bank in New York that our firm has had dealings with for years, trust funds and what not. Well, one day I had occasion to call their president, and I was told he wasn’t in. So I asked to be switched to the head of their trust division, and he wasn’t in. So, kind of jokingly, I asked what was going on, was it some kind of holiday in New York? And the switchboard operator tells me it was Yon—Yom—”
“Yom Kippur,” Don Burkhardt supplied.
“That’s right, Yom Kippur. It’s their very special holy day.” He turned to the younger man. “How did you know?”
“Because my partner is a Jew, and a lot of my friends are.”
“Oh! Well, anyway, the point I was trying to make is that all the years I had been dealing with them, it never struck me that they were Jewish. The whole firm is. At least all the top brass. What do you think of that?” He shook his head in wonder.
“You guys make me sick,” said Burkhardt, pushing away from the table as if to give physical demonstration of his disgust. “You talk like a bunch of Ku Klux red-necks.”
“You mean me?” Jason Walters was indignant. “Don’t you try to make me out a bigot. I’ll have you know our family physician is Dr. Goldstein here in town and we think the world of him.”
“If you mean me, Don,” Megrim drawled, “it’s ho
gwash. My last year in college, I roomed with a Jew. He lives out in Detroit now, and whenever I get there on business, he’s the first one I call on. We go to dinner and then maybe a show and afterward we might go to a bar and just talk. Why, there are things I tell him that I wouldn’t tell to my brother, or my wife, either, for that matter. He’s probably closer to me than—”
“And I might point out,” Jason Walters went on loftily, “that a couple of years ago, instead of going to Bermuda or Palm Beach for our winter vacation the way we usually do, Grace and I went to the Holy Land, and I told everybody what a terrific job they were doing. Of course, they’ve got to do something about the Palestinian refugees, but on balance they’ve done wonders, and I said so every chance I got.”
“You’ve got to understand, Don,” said Albert Megrim soothingly, “that this is a social club. It’s a place where you come to meet people. Naturally, you prefer your own kind because you’re more comfortable with them.”
“That’s right,” said Walters earnestly. “Look, my daughters go to the dances here. Well, naturally, I want them to meet their own kind of people. That doesn’t mean I’m prejudiced.”
“Sure,” said Burkhardt scornfully, “everybody denies being anti-Semitic, but—”
“I don’t,” said Ellsworth Jordon.
“You don’t?” The young man stared at him. “You mean you are anti-Semitic?”
“Certainly. All of us are. And you are, too, Burkhardt. You’re ashamed to admit it because you have a lot of crackpot liberal ideas about how only the ignorant are prejudiced. But you are just the same. Having one as a business partner, or as a family physician whom you think the world of, or as a best friend proves nothing. Or, rather, to a Jew it proves you are anti-Semitic. That’s a kind of inside joke among them. Anytime anyone says his best friends are Jews, they know it’s an anti-Semite talking.” He smiled broadly. “I know, because at one time some of my best friends were Jewish.”
“But you just said—” Don Burkhardt was nonplussed.
“Oh, I can admit it because I know why we’re anti-Semitic.”
“You do? Why?”
“Because they make us feel uncomfortable.”
“Why should they make you feel uncomfortable?”
“Because they’re better than we are,” said Jordon simply.
They stared at him.
“Hogwash! How do you mean, better?” demanded Megrim.
“Morally, ethically,” said Jordon. “I guess they’re just more civilized than we are. That’s what makes us feel uncomfortable, and that’s why we dislike them.” He laughed aloud. “And the joke is that the buggers don’t have any idea why they’re disliked, not a clue. They just don’t understand the psychology of it. They point out that they’re good and loyal citizens with a low divorce rate and a low crime rate, that they’re sober and industrious and ambitious. They’re active in all kinds of worthwhile movements and reforms and are usually on the side of the underdog. But that doesn’t get you liked, you know. Quite the contrary. They were the first to help the Blacks, for instance, and the result is that they are the ones the Blacks resent most.”
“Yeah, but they helped the Blacks because they’re both minority peoples,” Megrim pointed out. “But you take in Israel, where they are in the majority—”
“They’re making the same mistake,” said Jordon promptly. “They set up a two-bit country on a two by four piece of land, and the first thing they do is to take in all their kinfolk from the Arab countries, the old and the sick, and not a dime among the lot of them. And they feed them when they themselves haven’t got a pot to pee in. And there were almost as many of these refugees as the total population of the country at the time.”
Jordon took a sip of his drink and continued, “On the other hand, the entire Arab world, about eighty million of them with Lord knows how many millions of square miles of territory, could not find room for a couple of thousand of their own kinfolk and left them in refugee camps to rot. And everybody like Jason Walters here says the Israelis have got to do something about their Palestinian refugees, the Israelis, mind you, not the Arabs.”
“Yeah, they take care of their own,” said Megrim. “Everybody knows that. But today—”
“Today they have the Good Fence over at the Lebanon border,” said Burkhardt. “And those aren’t their own they’re giving free medical treatment. Any Arab who comes to the fence, Christian or Moslem, who needs help, gets it.”
“Yeah, how about that, Padre?” Jordon jeered. “Those are Christians that are being slaughtered, and nobody in the Christian world lifts a finger or even protests, not the Pope, not your World Council of Churches, not the Christian countries. Only the damn Jews. It’s downright embarrassing. No wonder that no one supports them in the UN. That’s the point I was making. They make everybody uncomfortable, so everybody votes against them.”
“The United States doesn’t do much better there,” Jason Walters pointed out. “And if you come right down to it, most countries hate us, too.”
Jordon chortled. “Sure they do, and it’s for the same reason. We’re a little that way, ourselves.”
“Hogwash! They hate us because we’re rich and powerful,” said Megrim.
“No, that’s not it,” Jordon asserted. “When you’re powerful, you’re feared. Sure you may be hated, but only as long as there’s reason for being afraid of you. In World War II we hated the Japs and the Germans because we were afraid of them. We didn’t hate the Italians because we weren’t. And as soon as the war was over, we also stopped hating the Japs and the Germans. You want to know why America is hated today? Why all this ‘Yankee, Go Home’ propaganda? It’s because we were guilty of perpetrating a terrible act of charity, the Marshall Plan. Never before in the history of the world had a conquering country set out to rebuild the countries it had defeated. We gave away millions, with no strings attached. And we’ve been hated for it ever since. And they’ll go on hating us until the memory of that tremendous moral act is dimmed or forgotten.”
“That’s pure hogwash, Ellsworth,” Megrim drawled. “The reason they dislike us is because we’re brash and pushy when we’re in their countries. Maybe it’s because we’re away from home, or because we don’t know their language or their customs, so we feel a little uncertain and we cover up by being, well, assertive. And that’s why we tend to dislike Jews—because they’re pushy.”
“I wouldn’t say they were pushy,” said Burkhardt. Now that the conversation was on a philosophical level, he could speak calmly. “I think they’re a little more intense than we are. That’s all. My partner, for instance, when he gets involved in a project, it’s as though the whole world depended on it. The same when he tries to relax and play golf. He races through the course. It’s as though everything he does is a little bit more, as though he’s operating on a higher body temperature, if you see what I mean. And I’ve noticed it in others, too. It may be something in their genes. Stands to reason, with all the trouble they’ve been through, pogroms and what not, those living today must be the result of a special selection process.”
“Not at all. It’s their religion,” Jordon declared flatly.
“They don’t have any religion,” said Dr. Springhurst, his interest stirred for the first time.
“Cummon, Padre, they invented it, the modern kind, I mean,” said Jordon.
“They did. And for a while, they were a religious people. The Lord was close to them in those days and proved Himself with miracles.” The old man shook his head lugubriously. “But the more He proved Himself, the more they moved away from Him. Imagine, after a miracle like the parting of the Red Sea, they constructed the golden calf. Nevertheless they remained a religious people. It was during the life of our Lord Jesus that the great change came. He saw it and tried to prevent it. That was His mission, to prevent the Scribes and the Pharisees from turning the true religion into a kind of practical ethical culture society. They don’t have a God, not one they can look to for salvation. Th
eir God can’t be known, by definition, if you please. He can’t be seen. He can’t even be imagined. He’s like X in algebra. It enables them to justify any regulation or code of rules they wanted to set up: ‘Do it because it is commanded by the Lord.’ They don’t demand faith. They have no hope of heaven, no fear of hell, merely a code of behavior justified only with ‘Thus saith the Lord.’ See, that way they don’t have to prove anything. They don’t have to convince their people that it’s right or worthwhile or intelligent or practical. There’s no argument about a different way or a better way by the opposition. Merely, this is the law because God says so. Sure, they passed some good laws, as any governing body would be likely to do, and some damn silly ones, too. But that’s not religion any more than the American Constitution is religion, or the Code Napoléon. That’s what our Lord Jesus fought against. This wasn’t the usual backsliding that Moses had to contend with when they turned away from the God of Israel to other gods. But this was turning away from the basic concept of religion, the relation of a man to God. That’s why they are disliked, Ellsworth. Because they are the one godless people.”
“That puts them right in your church, Ellsworth,” said Megrim, grinning. “They’re a bunch of atheists according to the good doctor.”
“Nah.” With a wide sweep of his hand, Ellsworth Jordon made a gesture of dismissal. “You’ve missed it, Padre. We don’t object to them because they’re godless. I certainly wouldn’t on that account. Maybe they did give up their religion for an ethical culture society. But not content with that, they then palmed Jesus on the rest of us. Remember, He’s one of theirs. They foisted Him on us, and they slid out from under. They gave us a religion that nobody can follow—turn the other cheek and all that sort of thing, while they developed a system, a set of rules, if you like, that people can live with. That’s what we resent, that they eased us into a religion that makes us feel guilty all the time.”
Thursday the Rabbi Walked Out Page 6
