36 Arguments for the Existence of God (21 page)

“Never really thought about it?”

Jonas Elijah Klapper collapsed back into his chair, his outburst knocking the stuffing out of him.

But he soon recovered. He sat up and, turning his back to Cass, put his elbows on his desk and buried his face in his palms. Cass sat there in an agony of uncertainty. Anything at all could be happening now. One guess was as good as the next. Minutes passed. Should he quietly exit? Had Jonas Elijah Klapper already excused him and gone back to work? Cass knew from the others that this sometimes happened.

“Well, this is extraordinary,” Professor Klapper finally said, turning around in his revolving chair and again facing Cass. “This is something I could never have foreseen.”

Jonas Elijah Klapper was gazing at Cass with discomfiting intensity, as if searching in Cass Seltzer’s amiable though distressed visage for signs of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s lingering presence. Cass was forced to stare straight back into the professor’s face, and at close range.

It was, for some obscure reason, excruciatingly uncomfortable to be this physically close to Jonas Elijah Klapper. Not even he was Pure Spirit. The soaring sentences were punctuated by panting intakes of air. The thighs, encased in gray broadcloth, seemed like items better described in the vocabulary of architecture than of anatomy. His face, too, was markedly corporeal—heavy and fleshy. The cultivated elegance of his mind had done what it could, but when he spoke of “the divine pathos,” “the inconsolable solitude,” “the fraught distance between the poet and reader,” he never managed to look more pathetic, inconsolable, or fraught than the man behind the deli counter. But his eyes were sad. There was a depth of sadness in his eyes.

“I have a great interest in meeting the Valdener Rebbe, a man who I suspect confounds that prejudice which sees no worldly knowledge in the Hasidim. As you, of course, are intimately aware, my dear
Mr. Seltzer—or may I call you Reb Chaim?—the Grand Rabbi of the Valdeners named the seat of his New World rabbinical court New Walden, presumably alluding to the American transcendentalism of our own homegrown seers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.”

That wasn’t the way Cass’s mother told the story, but Cass wasn’t about to argue with Professor Klapper’s superior erudition.

“We shall seize this extraordinary expedient posthaste! Reb Chaim, I count on you to make the necessary arrangements!”

They rode to New Walden in a Lincoln Continental.

It had been Roz who had gone to the streamered lot in Somerville and rented the car on Klapper’s—or, rather, Frankfurter’s—dime. Jonas Elijah Klapper had never learned to drive, so a chauffeur was needed, or so Roz kept insisting to Cass.

“But I know how to drive.”

“Tell him your license has expired! I’m not missing this!”

Professor Klapper had seemed a bit put out to learn that an unknown female would be accompanying them, but his attitude toward Cass had undergone so steep an upgrade since he’d learned of Cass’s Valdener connections that he had refrained from too vigorous a protest.

After Professor Klapper had settled himself into the front passenger seat, he turned and examined the driver at length, peering at her over the top of his bifocals.

“I presume from your coiffure that you are an adherent of Rastafarianism. I can assure you that I accord your belief system the same respect I do all religions. I believe it to be a prejudice of temporalism, akin to racism and sexism, when a religion is dismissed on the grounds that it has been established at a time too near the present. Indeed, all religions emerged at some present or other. So let me hasten to declare that you will find nothing but deference on my part for your faith that Haile Selassie is the Messiah.”

Cass braced himself for Roz’s reaction, which, if they were lucky, would be confined to peals of laughter, but Roz stared straight ahead and remained silent.

Jonas Elijah Klapper, satisfied that he had made his point of view known, turned himself to the activity of getting the seat belt around him
and inserted into its buckle. He was struggling with the contraption, and Roz, under normal circumstances, would have offered to help, but she couldn’t risk an utterance that would unblock the swell of laughter that she was forcefully resisting for poor Cass’s sake. At last they heard the click, and Roz wordlessly put the car into gear.

Before they’d gotten very far on the Massachusetts Turnpike, Jonas Elijah Klapper decided that he did, vehemently, object to the Rastafarian’s driving. Either Roz normally drove like this, or she was enjoying getting a rise out of their passenger. From the back, Cass could see that Professor Klapper was gripping the sides of his seat.

“Which of these contraptions indicates the speed at which we are recklessly hurtling, young lady?”

“Gee, I don’t know. Is there any way to tell our speed, Cass?”

“Now, see here, they have helpfully posted the speed limit at regular intervals— There! There! We just passed another sign with ‘55’ emblazoned upon it! There must be some way to determine the rate at which you are hastening us toward our death.”

He leaned over to try to get a look at the dials.

“Don’t do that, Jonas! Never crowd the driver, especially at the rate we’re going!”

“So you admit we are exceeding the limit! I demand that you pull over immediately and cede the steering wheel to Mr. Seltzer!”

“His license is expired! It’s against the law!”

“So is the reckless endangerment of one’s mortally afrighted passengers! I shall defray all costs should Mr. Seltzer be issued a summons.”

“What about the points on his record? What about the hike in his insurance premiums?”

“Gladly shall I compensate for all, young lady! Premiums, tickets, a hush-hush bribe to the stalwart officer in blue if he can be induced to take it! It shall all be worth it to live to see another morrow!”

The professor prevailed. Cass and Roz switched places.

It was a cold but piercingly bright Sunday afternoon in late February. As they crossed the Hudson River on the Tappan Zee Bridge, the skyline of Manhattan rose up in all its glory.

“It isn’t far now,” Cass announced. He found himself excited to be returning after all these years.

His mother had been amazed when he’d told her about the field trip he was taking. He had called her, at Professor Klapper’s urging, to find out how they should get in touch with the Rebbe to arrange for a personal visit.

“My cousin Henoch,” Deb had answered. “He’s the Rebbe’s
gabbai
, or personal assistant. It all goes through Cousin Henoch.”

“Do you have Cousin Henoch’s phone number?”

“I’ll get it from Shaindy.” Shaindy, another of Deb’s countless cousins, was the only one in the family with whom Deb remained in contact. Deb’s family had been unusual in New Walden, since Deb had no brothers and sisters, prompting her to fantasize that whatever had prevented her parents from being maximally fruitful had prevented them from having any children at all. The fact that she looked so much like her father, Mendel Sheiner, who had been a bookkeeper in a jewelry exchange in Manhattan’s Diamond District, didn’t count conclusively against her fantasy. A lot of the Valdeners resembled each other. The Rebbe may have decided to redistribute the wealth, taking from a family with lots of children to give to a sterile couple. Anyway, it was a fantasy.

“It’s not going to be traumatic for you to go back there?”

“No, not at all. I didn’t have to grow up there the way you did. I don’t have any trauma associated with the place.”

“Well, that’s good. I guess.” They both laughed. “Wait till I tell Jesse. He won’t believe you’re going with Klapper to New Walden.”

“How’s he doing?”

“Pretty well, I think. He’s got a job at the library. And he’s enrolled as a non-matric at Fairleigh Dickinson. I think the quiet time might be doing him some good. I’m hoping he’s reflecting.”

Jesse was living at home for the year, on a forced leave of absence from NYU for having been involved in a ring that sold term papers to other students.

“That’s good. Is he around now?”

“No, he’s out. I never ask him where. After all, if he were still at school, I wouldn’t know.”

“That seems right,” Cass said, though sometimes he wondered. His mother had strong scruples in regard to autonomy and self-determination. She had had to overcome so much external pressure—her parents, her
community, the Valdener Rebbe—in choosing her own way through life that she was loath to exert pressure on anyone else. When it came to Jesse, pressure probably wouldn’t have made any difference anyway.

“I’ll give you a report on New Walden when I get back.”

“It won’t have changed much, that’s for sure. It’s a point of pride that if the Besht were resurrected and he made his way to New Walden …”

“Because, let’s face it, what else would he want to do with himself?”

“That goes without saying. Anyway, he’d get to New Walden and he’d speak to the Valdeners, ask them what they thought, what they knew, and he wouldn’t realize that a day had gone by since he’d walked the earth in the early eighteenth century. Nothing would have changed.”

“Better sanitation, though.”

“Marginally.”

His mother hated the place. But not Cass. As soon as they got across the bridge, he started looking out for landmarks.

They turned onto the Palisades Parkway toward Bear Mountain.

“This is it, this is the exit,” Cass said when he saw the sign for New Town.

They drove through New Town, down Main Street, and when they got to the T-junction where it ended, Cass surprised himself by knowing exactly which way to turn, the left—the other left, and then the right that brought the Lincoln Continental right there to the parking lot with the heap of buses that marked the entrance to New Walden.

The buses were the property of the New Walden Kosher Bus Company, owned by a Valdener Hasid who lived in New Walden. The bus company was the town’s biggest business, and the man who owned the company, Alter Luckstein, was New Walden’s richest man. None of the buses matched any of the others. They were different models, different sizes. Alter read the classified ads in the trade papers for any bus that had been in an accident or had caught fire. Then he bought it, fixed it up, and put it back on the road. Luckstein’s buses not only took the Valdeners back and forth between New Walden and Brooklyn or Manhattan, where many of them worked in the Diamond District or the large electronics-and-camera stores, but also were rented out across the wider metropolitan area by Orthodox Jewish day schools and other Jewish organizations.
They even had some regular public routes from New York to nearby towns, competing well with Greyhound.

Just past the buses there was a sign: “Welcome to New Walden, America’s only shtetl. Please observe the custom of our ways and dress modestly. No women in shorts or pants or sleeveless tops.”

Otherwise, the place looked extraordinarily ordinary, at least at first blush, a nondescript tract of roads, little more than wending country lanes, that were lined with modest two-story houses, their front lawns strewn with plastic tricycles, slides, and toys.

They had an appointment to meet with the Grand Rabbi at four o’clock, and they were early.

“Let’s park and walk,” Roz suggested from the backseat. “Mingle with the natives, find some informants. You can’t do fieldwork from a car.”

“We are not here to do your fieldwork, young lady. If you want to get out and walk, please don’t restrain yourself. Mr. Seltzer and I shall console ourselves over the loss of your company.”

“Come on, don’t you want to stretch your legs after that long ride? And, Cass, you must want to check out your old haunts. Do you remember where your grandmother lived?”

“No, I do not wish to, as you say,
‘stretch my legs.’ ”
Jonas Elijah Klapper shuddered.

It was too cold for children to be outside playing with the toys. They passed a few women pushing baby carriages, shepherding very young children, almost all of them seemingly girls, with long hair escaping from their hooded coats.

“The older kids are in school,” Cass said, as he drove around the neighborhood. “Sunday’s just a regular day for them.”

“So they go to school six days a week?” Roz asked.

“They get out early on Fridays. Especially in the winter, when the days are short, so the Sabbath, which starts at sundown, comes early. The Sabbath, Shabbes, is something to see. That’s when the men deck themselves out in these amazing fur hats called
shtreimels
and these long satin caftans, called
kaputas
. And they all wear high leather boots, almost like jackboots, with their pants tucked in.”

“Do the women get to wear amazing fur hats?” Roz asked.

“No, the women just dress dowdy, in a way guaranteed to call no attention to themselves.”

“I wonder if I’ll pass,” Roz said. She was wearing the same long crushed-velvet skirt that she’d been wearing when Cass had first met her. He’d warned her about the laws of modesty. She didn’t have to wear her hair covered, since she wasn’t married, but Cass and she had decided that the dreadlocks had best be concealed, so she’d bought a peacock-blue kerchief, and in a restroom at their last pit stop had looped her hair up in it in a sort of turban. For their part, Cass and Klapper had come supplied with white satin skullcaps in their pockets that Jonas Elijah Klapper had supplied, “Ronald’s Bar Mitzvah June 12 1977” embossed in gold on the inside.

“I think the goal is just not to offend them. At best, they’ll think you’re a stray that the Lubavitchers have converted.”

“The Lubavitchers. They’re the ones with the mitzvah-mobile, right? They used to come to Frankfurter when I was an undergraduate, lassoing boys to put on phylacteries and girls to light the Sabbath candles.”

Cass had driven past his bubbe’s house without announcing it, slowing down slightly—they were going less than fifteen miles an hour anyway— and trying to take it in. He’d always known it as his bubbe’s house. His grandfather had died before he was born. It was a modest tract house, and it made him happy to see the number of toys crammed into its front yard now. He hoped the children who owned these toys were enjoying better childhoods than his mother had in that house. He felt a stab of love for that unhappy woman, his bubbe, who had had such a fine eye for discerning the flaws in others, the slights to herself, reacting with gleeful contempt for the former and unstanchable rage toward the latter, but who had, for some mysterious reason, loved and always forgiven her little Chaim. One of his earliest memories—it might have been his first— was his bubbe’s collapsing at the sight of him when they’d come for a visit after he’d had his first haircut. She had shrieked as if slashed by an assassin’s blade, clutching at her chest, berating his mother. He’d never forget it, it had scared him so badly.