The Promise (26 page)

I came out of the house into the gray, cold winter and walked home through streets that seemed choked with scurrying Hasidim on last-minute errands before the Shabbat.

My father was in his study. He had seen Rav Kalman’s article. His colleague at the yeshiva had brought it to his attention.

“There is nothing anyone can do,” he said. “Rav Kalman has a right to express his opinion.”

“He used me.”

My father said nothing. I told him what Reb Saunders had said. He nodded heavily.

“There will be other attacks, Reuven. But I am grateful to Reb Saunders for his silence.”

“Why is he picking on your book? I don’t understand it. There are so many other books he can attack.”

“No,” he said quietly. “Mine carries a certain authority. It is my reputation that he sees as a threat. He is a musarnik. He is defending the Torah.”

“He’s a sneak, that’s what he is.”

“Reuven—”

“He had me believing he really wanted to understand the book, and all he did was use me.”

My father shook his head and made a waving motion with his hand. “I do not want to talk about it any more. It is time to prepare for Shabbat. But you will do me a favor and not speak disrespectfully of one of your teachers. Now we will have to hurry or we will be late for Kabbalat Shabbat.”

But a few minutes later it began to rain very hard and we did not go to the synagogue but prayed at home and then had our Shabbat meal with the rain loud on the window of the kitchen
and a feeling of gloom thick and oppressive all around us as we sang the Shabbat songs and chanted the Grace and sat around the table for a while, talking of Michael and Rachel and Danny and Rav Kalman and the way things had begun to change for me—and as the minutes went by I began to notice for the first time that week how tired my father really looked and to hear the strange quality of resignation in his voice, and it occurred to me that I had been so involved in my own problems with Rav Kalman that I had not thought to ask my father what had been happening to him on account of the book, what was going on in his own yeshiva. I asked him.

He gazed at me wearily and did not respond for a moment. “There are problems,” he said.

“What’s happening?”

“Some of the new people are—dissatisfied.”

“But what’s happening?”

“We will talk of it another time. But it is nothing to worry about.”

“They can’t do anything to you. You helped build that yeshiva. You’ve been there more than twenty years.”

“Twenty-four years,” he said softly. “Can they do anything?”

“I do not think so.”

“My God, it’s like living in the time of Spinoza.”

“Yes,” my father murmured. “There is that feeling sometimes.”

“Are those new people musarniks?”

“No. But they are all under the influence of Rav Kalman.”

“Two years,” I said. “Why couldn’t he have come just two years later?”

My father grimaced but said nothing.

It rained all through the night and the next day and we prayed at home and had our meals and talked. In the early afternoon my father went into his room to rest and I stood by my window and watched the rain falling on the ailanthus in our back yard, the
branches bare and black and dripping, rain splattering into the puddles on the earth, rain streaking the window, rain blowing against the house in the wind. I thought of the summer and the lake and the wind against the mainsail of the Sailfish and the waves high and white-crested and churning and Michael moving back and forth alongside the center board and Rachel and I swimming in the lake and the old man in the carnival and Joseph Gordon saying “No Geneva Conventions here” and Molly Bloom big with seed. It all seemed another world and another time and I turned away from the window and lay down on my bed and tried to read a book but could not and I closed my eyes and listened to the rain. It rained all day and into the night and it was still raining when my father and I finally went to bed.

I sat at one of the long tables in the yeshiva synagogue the next morning trying to prepare for the class with Rav Kalman, and found myself unable to concentrate on the words. Irving Goldberg sat alongside me, looking round and solemn and gloomy. There were about one hundred students at the tables in the synagogue and the sing-song of their voices was loud. I could see them studying and glancing at me. It had not taken long for the news of Rav Kalman’s article to get around. So I was the center of much attention that Sunday morning, and students kept coming over to talk to me about the attack against my father.

But there were those who did not come over to me but kept looking my way and talking among themselves and nodding and smiling, not without some glee, I noticed. And by the time the preparation period was over and we were all going to our classes, it was quite evident that the student body of the rabbinical department had polarized into two camps, one that agreed wholeheartedly with Rav Kalman’s attack against my father because text criticism was a dangerous threat to the sanctity of the Talmud, and a second that felt Rav Kalman’s article to be typical of his effort to make the yeshiva a throwback to the ghetto yeshivoth of Eastern Europe. There were loud arguments and they went on in the corridor and continued inside the classroom. I heard them all around me, but I stayed out of it. I was afraid of what I might say.

The church bells rang. The classroom grew silent. We gazed tensely at the door. Rav Kalman entered and came up to his desk. The bells ceased ringing. He arranged his books on the desk, lit a cigarette, and called on someone to read. I sat listening to the
student read. Rav Kalman paced back and forth. He did not call on me. He barely looked at me. It is a strange experience to sit across a desk from a man who has attacked your own father in print and used you to help stage that attack. It was not difficult for me to hate him.

After class I had a quick lunch in the school cafeteria and took the subway. At five minutes to three that afternoon I was climbing the stone steps of the huge, mansionlike building of the residential treatment center.

Michael was waiting for me in the downstairs living room. He was sitting in an easy chair next to one of the draped windows, reading a newspaper. It was very cold outside and the living room was quite crowded. There was a hum of subdued conversation. A lavishly decorated Christmas tree stood in a corner and a large brass electric Hanukkah menorah was on the mantelpiece next to the schooner. I came quickly over to Michael and saw he was reading the Orthodox newspaper in which Rav Kalman had published his article about my father.

He looked up at me and blinked his eyes. “Hello,” he said. “You’re on time today.”

“How are you, Michael?”

“Did you see this?” He indicated the newspaper.

I nodded. “Where did you get it?”

“Mr. Saunders gave it to me on Friday morning. We had a session on Friday morning.” He sounded agitated. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

We came outside and went down the marble stairs.

“Are your parents coming today?” I asked.

“Tonight. They’re in Washington now for a conference on Jewish education. Let’s go this way.”

He led me into the trees. The wind blew the leaves across the ground. The sun was bright, but the wind felt knife-edged with cold and I put up the collar of my coat. Michael walked bareheaded, one hand holding the newspaper, the other in his
pocket. “It’s nothing,” I heard him say. “Compared to what they say about my father, this is nothing.”

“It’s enough,” I said.

“How does it feel?”

We walked on a moment in silence. “Uncomfortable.”

“That’s all? You only feel uncomfortable?”

“Very uncomfortable.”

“That’s because it’s nothing. When I read what they say about my father it makes me feel like a toilet.”

I said nothing. We continued walking in silence.

“Why did Mr. Saunders give you that?” I asked.

“I don’t know. He said I might want to read it.” We were walking slowly through the trees and there was shade and the wind was loud in the swaying branches and cold against my face. “It doesn’t feel good, does it? It feels very bad. It feels like you’re a bug and they’re stepping on you. Isn’t that what it feels like?”

“It’s not quite like that, Michael.”

He looked at me, his face pale, his lips drawn tight, the glasses down along the bridge of his nose. “Don’t you hate him?” he asked. “Don’t you hate Rav Kalman?”

I did not say anything.

“Like a bug,” he muttered. “That’s what it feels like. There it is. There’s my house.”

We had come to the pagoda-like structure.

“Come on inside,” he said. “Rachel’s inside.”

There was no one on the white-painted circular bench. I came up the two wooden steps. We sat down on the bench. Overhead the wind moaned around the sharply angled red roof. Michael put the newspaper in his pocket. He stared down moodily at the wooden floor, then looked at me.

“Why don’t you get out of there?” he asked in a high, thin, agitated voice.

“Out of where?”

“Your school.”

“Why should I get out of my school?”

“It’s full of spiders and cobwebs and old men who cheat you.”

I did not say anything.

“Evil old men.”

“They’re not evil. If they were evil it would be easy to get out of the school. They’re very sincere.”

“The people who burned Giordano Bruno were sincere.” I said nothing.

“Torquemada was sincere. You know about Torquemada?”

“Yes.”

“He was sincere. The people who excommunicated Spinoza were sincere. The people who excommunicated my—” He stopped suddenly, his eyes blinking repeatedly. “Evil,” he muttered through thin, curled lips. “Ugly and evil and sincere. So what? You don’t know anything about it. Are you going over to my parents’ tomorrow night?”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad. I’m really glad. You’re a friend. I never met an Orthodox person like you before.”

“Mr. Saunders is Orthodox.”

“He doesn’t go to your school. Besides, he’s going to be a psychologist, not one of your rabbis. He’s not yeshiva Orthodox.” He leaned forward intimately and pushed his glasses up along the bridge of his nose. “Listen. I was looking at the sky last night through my telescope. It was beautiful. I could see Sirius. I could even see its white dwarf star. I could see Procyon too, but I couldn’t find its white dwarf.” He was staring down at the floor and talking very rapidly in a high, tense monotone. I looked around quickly and could see no one. Michael went on talking. “Those red giants are something. They’re the opposite of the white dwarfs. Some of them are a million times brighter than the sun. Did you know that? Did you?”

“No,” I said very quietly.

“Epsilon Aurigae has a star that’s a billion miles in diameter. What do you think of that?”

“That’s big.”

“A billion miles in diameter.”

“I’m feeling a little cold, Michael. Should we go inside?”

“Once they thought the dark rift running along the Milky Way was a tunnel. They thought they could see extragalactic space through that tunnel. But it’s not a tunnel. It’s just cosmic dust. You can’t see the stars behind it because it’s so thick. It’s like black clouds. You can’t see some of the stars because of the black clouds. You didn’t know that.”

“No.”

“I saw a lot of stars last night, but I don’t want to talk about it any more.”

I did not want to tell him he could not have seen any stars last night because it had rained. I said nothing.

“I’m cold too,” he said. “Stay here for a minute. I’ll be right back.”

“Where are you going?”

“Inside for something. Wait for me here.”

He was on his feet. I got up.

“Wait for me here.”

“I’m freezing,” I told him.

“I’ll change it. Just wait for me. Will you wait?”

“All right.”

“I’ll change it if you wait. I’m tired of it anyway. Look at the way they painted it.”

He ran out of the pagoda and into the trees and was gone.

I sat there and waited. It was very cold. I was a little frightened and wondered if I ought to get help. Why the devil had Danny given him the newspaper? I sat there, worrying about Michael. I looked at my watch. It was close to four. He had been gone more than five minutes. I sat there a while longer. It was bitter cold. I got to my feet and came out of the pagoda. Leaves eddied like waves in the wind. I felt my shoes on the leaves and the leaves skittering against my trousers like dried insects. Through the naked branches of the trees I saw winter birds circling overhead against the pale afternoon sky. I moved quickly through the trees
toward the house and thought I saw someone in the distance and called Michael’s name but got no response. I went up the front stairs two at a time and into the large foyer.

The man behind the desk looked at me curiously as I came over to him. He was the same one who had been there the week before. I asked him if he had by any chance seen Michael.

“Michael who?”

“Michael Gordon.”

“He’s outside somewhere. May I have your name please?”

“I’m Robert Malter. I was visiting with him.”

“Oh yes. Michael just went outside a moment or two ago.”

“He went back outside?”

He looked at me narrowly. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes, of course.”

I went quickly out and down the stairs and into the trees toward the pagoda. I walked very quickly and finally I was running and there was the pagoda and Michael was on his knees on the wooden floor over a pile of leaves. He did not look up as I came behind him. He was on his knees over the leaves and I saw his hands move in a swift upward stroke and there was a sudden flare of light but the wind caught it and it was gone.

“What the devil are you doing?”

He did not look up.

“You stop that.”

“Go away.”

“Michael!”

There was another movement of his hands, very close to the leaves this time, and now there was smoke and the sudden swift spreading of the flame and I pushed him aside and put a foot on the flame and heard him curse and felt his arms on my back and I was falling over the bench, my right leg scraping against it, my arms flailing outward for one of the roof support beams and missing. I landed on my face on the leaf-covered earth and heard Michael screaming and cursing behind me. I got to my feet and jumped the bench back into the pagoda and knocked the box of
matches from Michael’s hand. He screamed at me. His voice was loud and piercing against my ear. He screamed and I held him and he broke loose and scrambled for the matches, cursing and screaming. I grabbed for the matches and he kicked my leg but I had the matches in my hand now, a small box of wooden matches, and he was screaming in my ear and pleading with me to give them to him and I tried talking to him but he kept on screaming and suddenly there was someone else in the pagoda and I looked around and it was the uniformed guard who stood at the gate.