36 Arguments for the Existence of God (36 page)

“Don’t thank me. I was glad to do it. Fascinating stuff. And then there it was, come to my rescue. What goes around, comes around.”

Cass cringed at that saying, even coming from Lucinda.

“Rational self-interest is always what morality boils down to,” she continued in a reflective tone of voice.

“Do you think so?”

“Of course. I’ve always figured you must, too.”

“Why’s that?”

“Well, isn’t that basically the core of Jewish ethics?”

“I never thought of it that way.”

“The way I heard it, Judaism is the religion of rational actors. My father explained it to me. His grandfather was religious, so he knew all about it. The great rabbis had a saying: ‘If I am not for myself, then who will be for me?’”

“And?”

“And what?”

“That’s only part of it.”

“It is?”

“The rest of the quote is: ‘And if I’m
only
for myself, then what am I?’”

“Are you sure? That’s not the way I heard it.”

“I’m sure.”

“Well, that’s a disappointment.”

“You don’t mean that.”

There’s a pause.

“Lucinda?”

“I’m kidding, I’m kidding! Give me a little credit for complexity, will you! It was a joke!”

But she hadn’t laughed. Again, Lucinda hadn’t laughed.

It was the most painful and most exalted of his memories.

He had gone with his mother, the abandoned wife, to seek assistance from the rabbinical court on East Broadway. She had begged the attending rabbi to force her husband to grant her a
get
, a Jewish divorce. By Jewish Law, it is the husband’s power alone to grant a
get
, and a woman in Hannah Klepfish’s position inhabits a despised no-woman’s-land, not married but not not-married, wandering in desolation between two worlds. The rabbi had sat there in judgment of her, with his barbed beard of dirty red, like the rusted pads of steel wool that she used for scrubbing her pots. But the Pharisee would not be moved. The Law would apply. Until this day, Jonas could not recall his mother’s sobs without feeling that his body might split apart from the agony.

And it came to pass in that house of judgment, amidst the humiliation heaped upon them, that the decree had come down. As they were being shown out—Jonas, six years old, supporting his prostrated mother—an ancient rabbi, hardly taller than little Jonas, had placed his opened palms atop the child’s head, and had shouted out, in the voice of the prophet,
“Hoy, hat der kleiner ein moah godol uneshomo niflo’o!”
—“Oh, the little one has such a great brain and a wondrous soul.”

In an instant, the woman and her son had gone from being cast down to lifted aloft. Hannah Klepfish was the mother of a child of whom prophecies were foretold.

The prophecy had unfolded on a day of jubilation when the letter of acceptance from Columbia University arrived at the Tillie E. Orlofsky projects on East Broadway. His blessed mother had danced—yes, whirled around like a Jewish maenad—on the faded but spotless kitchen linoleum. In her faded blue flannel bathrobe and her terry-cloth slippers,
the cream she skimmed off from the top of the bottled milk smeared onto her face as a moisturizer, she had kicked up her legs in some jig she must have learned as a young girl back in Kishinev, Bessarabia. A simple woman who had never mastered the English language, who had had to ask Jonas to write his own “Please excuse my son’s absence” notes to his elementary-school teachers, Hannah Klepfish held the acceptance letter in her right hand and offered a corner to Jonas, so that they had danced together like a bride and groom in a Jewish wedding, only not with a white handkerchief dangling between them but with the paper embossed with the blue shield and the Latin words
In lumine Tuo videbimus lumen
—“In Thy light shall we see light.”

She had lived to see her Jonas’s light spread throughout the world. He had become a professor at the great institution. Framed book jackets in every language papered the walls of her little apartment from floor to ceiling. He had never tainted her joy by disclosing the treachery of Great Britain.

Also never mentioned were the mortifications closer to home that Jonas underwent. As the decades passed, Columbia University had shown itself increasingly unworthy, finally assuming the proportions of perfidy in its failure to recognize the singularity of his achievements.

He had detested his colleagues. Oh, he had suffered,
suffered
, most especially when one of his mortal enemies, a most fearsome creature by the name of Harriet Horn (specialties: post-colonialism, gender and cultural studies), assumed the chair and proceeded to advocate positions for which no possible rationale could exist other than delivering hot irons to the exposed soul of Jonas Elijah Klapper. After every contentious department meeting, as he hurried away before anyone could detain him in chitchat, he would chant to himself a scrumptiously suitable verse adapted from the prophet Jeremiah:

He had naughtily inserted the word “no” before “standards,” and taken what comfort he might, an epicerastic to temper the acrimony of the humors (cf.
epikerastikos
, Galen).

He understood the nature of his trials: Where he trod, cosmic tremblings reverberated. Wherever he stood in the disputed terrain—whether it concerned syllabus reforms or the hiring of the latest imposter arrayed in foppish theory—that place became an arena for the hot conflict between heaven and hell engineered with a view toward universal issues. He had put his sufferings in their context, and he had endured.

But at Frankfurter University he required no such quaffs from balance-restoring epicerastics. Aside from a generous salary, sabbaticals, and territory—an entire floor of office space—they offered him the best of all possible relations with his colleagues—which is to say, none at all. None!
! No Harriet Horns to barge in red in the face, brandishing a copy
of The Collected Works of Transvestite Balladeers
and bellowing about dead white males. Jonas could—he would!—pack his syllabi with nothing but dead white males! He need never attend another departmental faculty meeting again, not unless he called one—and then, being the sole faculty member, he could boycott! Frankfurter’s terms made him want to break out into a dance, into a wild Slavic
kazachoc
. Inside, he was dancing, squatting down and kicking out a right leg, a left, a right!

To top it off, Frankfurter University had offered a taxonomic penthouse they would construct for his sole habitation. “Distinguished Professor,” the highest honor that was accorded a faculty member, was deemed incommensurate with Jonas Elijah Klapper’s stature. The title that was to be Jonas’s, and Jonas’s alone, in perpetuity, was Extreme Distinguished
Professor of Faith, Literature, and Values. If only that paragon of selfless maternality, who had been pitifully chained to the classification of an
agu-nah
, a deserted wife, had lived to see the change in academic nomenclature necessitated by her Jonas. And the signs and wonders had come pouring.

And now another.

The week after Roz’s emotional return from the Amazon, Cass went for his Tuesday meeting and found Marjorie Cutter sitting in the small office where Cass had expected to find the professor. Her face, normally stolid, was churned up with the agitated eagerness of a bystander at a fatal accident, and she placed her index finger vertically against her mouth, forming the crucifix of silence, and motioned for Cass to stay put. The door of the next office was closed, but Cass, following Marge’s urgent facial signals, listened, and an irate voice could be heard leaking through the wall.

Cass couldn’t share in Marge’s fevered excitement about a confrontation of soap-opera proportions happening in real life and within hearing. On the contrary, he felt his innards clenching. For a few minutes, while the voices remained muffled, it was conceivable that there was nobody but Jonas Elijah Klapper in the next office, either talking on the phone or having a psychotic breakdown, but the raised voices soon partitioned into two.

And suddenly there he was. He stood at the threshold, staring unseeingly, or so it seemed to Cass, his features distorted in that silent-film shriek of horror that recalled to Cass a moment he would just as soon have forgotten, when Klapper’s wrath over “Dover Beach” had nearly annihilated Cass. Professor Klapper pushed past Cass, who tried to retract himself, and elbowed Marge to reach for his briefcase on the floor near the desk. He said not a word and turned away to flee, but not before Cass had caught sight of the wild gleam of triumph snaking its way across his face.

While Cass and Marge remained frozen like hands on a clock in a blackout, another apparition materialized at the threshold.

The dean of the faculty, often accused of being a bloodless prig, was
giving the lie to the accusation. Browning Crisp’s face was an apoplectic shade of red. He, too, stared unseeingly, or so it seemed to Cass, for several long moments.

“That is the most impossible man on the face of the earth!” he finally announced, which was as out of character as the pounding blood in his face, since Browning was the soul of decorum, and it was hardly decorous for someone at a certain rank, in this case a dean, to address those at a lower rank, in this case a secretary and a graduate student, regarding a personage above them, in this case a professor, not to speak of an Extreme Distinguished Professor.

“Professor Klapper?” ventured Marge in a small voice, hoping to push the dean to a few more indiscretions.

“Indeed!”

“You look like you’ve been given a terrible time,” Marge urged gently.

“Well,” Crisp said, collecting himself, “I daresay I’ll recover.”

The dean had gone to the Extreme Distinguished Professor to discuss his giving up some of his building space—he was using most of it for storage anyway—because it would be needed for the new brain and cognitive sciences center. Klapper had stared him down with the most intimidating of his glowers.

“I shall not relinquish a cubit!”

With his entreaty to Klapper’s sense of collegiality rebuffed, the dean reminded Jonas that the space belonged to the university. Brain science and cognitive science were dynamic and expanding fields. To stay in the first rank, Frankfurter had to allow them to grow. Harriet and Manny Katzenbaum had generously donated the funds for renovation if the university could come up with the available space. It was Browning’s responsibility as dean to allocate space according to the greater good of the university. Jonas’s underused offices were the logical option for the time being.

Perhaps it was the word “logical” that had touched off the ensuing tirade. Klapper had insulted Browning Crisp up and down the canon, accusing him of being an academic apparatchik of the noetic
nomenklatura
, a moral Quisling who was reneging on the covenant of trust and who
would be reduced, if he were remembered at all, to an ignominious footnote in the history of Jonas Elijah Klapper.

At this point, Browning Crisp lost his own temper and wielded his decanal power. There was no more negotiation: some of Jonas’s space would be taken away. Klapper told him that in that case he would resign. It may have been said in the heat of the moment, but Browning Crisp was going to hold him to it.

Jonas had shown, under the circumstances, the restraint of a saint. The insult was historic. They were proposing not only to reduce his square footage but to bestow the stolen property on his sworn enemies. These were the illiterate mob intending to trample out intellectual and spiritual life as Jonas Elijah Klapper had known and shaped it, the light-spun span of all the faith, literature, and values of the ages. This brain and cognitive sciences center represented the worst of scientism, for it had set its sights on the study of Man. “Go, wond’rous creature! mount where Science guides, / Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides; / Instruct the planets in what orbs to run, / Correct old time, and regulate the Sun”—but keep your filthy fingers off the study of Man! This was but a small share of his thoughts on the matter that he had seen fit to impart to the odious dean of faculty.

The ex–Extreme Distinguished Professor hadn’t gotten in touch with any of his graduate students, nor had anyone from the administration. At the designated time, the seven of them were assembled round the seminar table, awaiting the Sublime, the Subliminal, and the Self.

Vague rumors had reached them, but they were uncertain of everything. It fell to Cass to tell them quietly of the scene that he had witnessed, and they received the news in wounded silence. The few desultory speculations concerned where he might go next, and they along with him.