36 Arguments for the Existence of God (37 page)

“He could go anywhere.”

“Not Great Britain.”

“Well, of course, not there.”

“He could always go back to Columbia. I’m sure Columbia would be thrilled to have him back.”

“It would be good to go back to New York.”

“Who knows where it will be? We could end up almost anywhere in the world.”

“It’s kind of exciting. Disorienting but exciting.”

“You have to expect the unexpected with Jonas.”

They sat there for the full two and a half hours of the seminar, long after they had given up on Professor Klapper’s appearing, feeling that it would be disloyal to leave before the allotted time was over. When Cass left them, they were heading as one toward the View from Nowhere.

Cass had decided against informing Klapper of his change of plans. He would go and speak to the dean of graduate students. His hope was that some other Frankfurter department would accept him. He had some ideas about what he wanted to study. But Cass received word from Klapper himself, a scrawled note left in his box summoning him.

Cass wasn’t sure in which of the two offices he’d find him. The door to the smaller of them was ajar, and Klapper was sitting at his desk, calmly writing. He didn’t turn at the sound of Cass’s footstep, so Cass knocked on the open door, and the professor turned around in slow motion.

“Ah, Reb Chaim. Take a seat.”

Jonas Elijah Klapper was smiling, and Cass recalled that inexplicable gleam of triumph that had vied with righteous fury for control of the professor’s face, as if the screaming match with Browning Crisp was the realization of all that he could hope for.

“So, Reb Chaim, here we are!”

Cass nodded. Professor Klapper’s face looked almost glazed with well-being.

“But not for long,” Klapper continued in response to Cass’s nod. “I shall soon be departing Frankfurter University. Indeed, I am going to a distant land. I shall be telling you where before too long. There are things I cannot yet say. I am enjoined to preserve the silence of the Dura Valley, or, to paraphrase the Valdener Rebbe, the silence of the Hudson Valley.”

The creases in his pate that had been pressed into place by ceaseless cerebration were smoothed, the blued shadows that mottled his jowls and the half-circles beneath his eyes were lightened, his coloring, usually
cement-gray, was roseate, and even the down slope of his eye seemed raised several degrees. Perhaps this was the face of beatitude.

“The Valdener Rebbe, may his name be blessed, spoke to me in the allegorical mode, this being the only means by which certain things may be imparted, a threefold interpretation being customary. And so it was that the Rebbe spoke of the special-needs children in the community. These children are beloved of God and yet separated from Him through no fault of their own. They lack the means to find their way through the sacred paths of learning. I alone, the Rebbe said, of all the men whom he had ever met, had the connections to help these children.

“‘The special-needs children of the community’ refers to the nation of Israel in exile, and the connections of which he spoke became clearer to me as he went on.

“He spoke of a child, one child. ‘On such a child I never dreamt to rest my eyes.’”

Klapper was a good mimic. Cass could hear the Rebbe’s voice lurking beind Klapper’s.

“He called the child ‘my son,’ and as he spoke his eyes glistened with the purity of his tears. ‘Abraham despaired of a son, and then Isaac was born. Hannah, too, despaired of a son. She went with her husband to the temple at Shiloh and prayed with such ardor that Eli the priest thought she must be drunk or out of her mind and wanted to throw her out.’”

And though Cass knew that Klapper’s eyes would move inexorably in the direction of the photograph, when they did he had to resist the urge to flee.

“‘I, too, knew such despair.’” He was still speaking in the Rebbe’s voice. “‘And as it is written of the Arizal, the lion of S’fat, so it was with the child. The child grew and was weaned and was brought to school and learned more and faster than any child his own age, following in the footsteps of Isaac on the way to Moriah.’”

Cass’s desire to flee had grown so urgent that he could feel it as a physical sensation spreading through his limbs.

Klapper had now sunk into profound reflection, and Cass cautiously began to rise from the green metal chair.

“Stay!” Klapper bellowed.

Cass sat down swiftly.

“I have alluded to the fact that I shall shortly be leaving these shores. It will not surprise you to learn that I shall be going to the holy city of S’fat, where my footsteps have always been pointed. In a manner of speaking, I am going into exile, at least for some years. I can take only one student with me. I have chosen you.”

“Me?”

“You seem surprised. I wonder why. Perhaps it is the humility of the true disciple.”

“But what about the others? What about Gideon Raven? He’s been studying with you for almost thirteen years. He understands your ideas better than anyone.”

“Gideon is a more-than-adequate student of my past. But you, Reb Chaim, shall be the student of my future. You have already had a taste of the bitterness of exile. I had a divination concerning you, even before I knew who you were, and I tested you. You are aware of what I allude to?”

“‘Dover Beach’?”

Klapper’s smile was benedictory, and he nodded once.

“I have too soft a heart and could not extend your trial too long. You see how nothing is as it seems? In a moment of abject humiliation, the loftiest of futures can be received. As Hannah and her son were lifted aloft, so, too, the tested student.”

Even Roz was stunned when Cass related this conversation with Klapper.

“S’fat? Where the hell is S’fat?”

He had gone to her place on Francis Avenue, hoping to find her there. She answered the door in a purple towel, her hair dripping wet. She had gone for a late run and had just gotten out of the shower.

“It’s in Israel. It’s where the Jewish mystics congregate. One of the hot spots.”

He wished that she didn’t go running at night. She was fearless, and he loved that about her, but he also worried.

“The Hot S’fat!” she said, laughing.

It would be wonderful to take care of her. She was a woman, even if she was Suwäayaiwä, and he wanted to take care of her.

“It’s not really funny.”

She was beautiful and brilliant, strong and immensely kind.

“It’s not?”

And she loved with such force. She had loved Tsetse, and she loved Azarya, and she loved him, too. She loved Cass Seltzer.

“He wants to take me along with him. Only me. None of the others. Not even Gideon. He’s abandoning them all.”

As wild and unpredictable as she was, she was always on his side. That was and would always be predictable. And he was on hers. Even without always getting what her side was, he knew with certainty that he’d be on it, and she’d be on his.

“What a shit. Still, you have to admit it’s all for the best.”

What a thing it is in this world to have somebody always on your side.

“I hope Gideon sees it that way. I worry that he’s about to become the most disappointed man in the world.”

“I don’t know. He’s got a lot of contenders.”

Cass was staring at Roz.

“What is it, Cass? Do I still have shampoo in my hair?”

He stooped down swiftly to one knee.

“I love you, Suwäayaiwä!”

“Well, I love you, too!”

She followed suit and got down on one knee in her purple towel.

“No, no. You have to stand, and I have to kneel!”

“Okay.” She got back up. “What are we playing?”

“We’re not. I’m proposing.”

“What are you proposing?”

“Marry me! Marry me and become Suwäayaiwä Seltzer.”

“Good one!” She laughed. “No, wait a minute! You mean it! Darling boy, get up. You’re upsetting me down there.”

He got up. She put her hand on his cheek.

“I can’t marry you, Cass.”

“Never? I know I’m young, but I’m getting older quick.”

“Cass, I can’t think about marriage, and you’re only thinking about it because you’re having a breakdown and haven’t realized it yet.”

“I don’t think I’m having a breakdown. I think I’m realizing that you’re the most perfect woman in the world.”

“Well, of course I am.” She gently stroked his hair. The tender gesture
made her feel even more impossibly tender. “I’ll always be there for you, but I need a life of maximal options.”

“Don’t you think you could live with maximal options married to me?”

“I have all kinds of things I need to do with my life. You do, too, only you don’t know what they are yet. Don’t look so woebegone! You’re going to have a lot more loves in your life.”

“That’s supposed to cheer me up?”

“You know what you’re doing, don’t you?”

“I’m asking you to marry me.”

“You’re trying to replace your infatuation with Jonas Elijah Klapper with an infatuation with me. You’re trying to do it so quickly that the loss won’t register on your mind. It’s a rebound reflex.”

“That’s not what love is.”

“Okay, I’m game. What’s love?”

“Love is this. It’s real. It’s not infatuation or bewitchment or enchantment. It’s the splendor that’s still there after the disenchantment of the world.”

If they got married, they would be able to tell their children that he had proposed to their mother while she was wearing a purple towel. It was the purple towel that gave him hope as he waited for her to break her long silence.

Cass was grateful—and surprised—when Pascale remembered to scrawl him a note and leave it where he would be certain to see it, telling him that his mother had called.

“Deb. Call. Urgent.”

She had put it on a front burner of the kitchen stove. Of course he would be certain to notice it when he came home from work to start dinner, as he did every night except when they ate out. The symbolism was perfect, worthy of Pascale, whose every gesture was touched by her poetry. Was she aware of the English idiom “putting something on the back burner”? Was there a similar expression in French? Cass’s colloquial French wasn’t good enough for him to know. It would be like her, though, the poetic economy and compression that wrapped the message in metaphor.

Still, his stomach lurched at the three words. His mother’s tone must have been truly urgent to break through the heavy fog of Pascale’s poetic distractions. He was almost sure the urgency had something to do with Jesse. There was no reason to think that Jesse had collided with disaster, unless one considered as a reason Jesse’s whole history, the reckless belief in his ability to push past the limits of the strictly moral, not to speak of the legal, and assume that he’d get away with it.

Things had been going well for Cass’s little brother for the last two years. He was working on Wall Street, for a firm called New Empire Reinvestment Opportunities, and he had soared to the top. He was living largely and glamorously. His girlfriends were supermodels, his apartment in SoHo so fabulous that Woody Allen had used it to film one of his movies, paying him twenty thousand dollars a day, which was chump change, Jesse said, but he’d agreed to it because it was so cool.

All of this made his mother nervous. Cass could tell because when she spoke about Jesse she only quoted him and never added her own commentary—as if she was willing herself to believe no more and no less than what he was telling her. It didn’t reassure her that the acronym for Jesse’s firm was NERO.

But the phone call had nothing to do with Jesse. It was Azarya Sheiner that his mother was worrying about.

“Things have reached a crisis state. He wants to leave. He doesn’t feel he can do anything else. He needs to go to a university. He needs to meet mathematicians.”

“He must be going through hell.”

“If it was hard for me, I can only begin to imagine what it’s like for him.”

“What do you think we can do for him?”

“That’s why I’m calling you. You know he’s been corresponding with that professor at MIT.”

“Gabriel Sinai.”

“Right. Gabriel Sinai. Seems like a lovely man.”

“He does.”

In the past few years, his mother had had more contact with the town where she’d grown up, America’s only shtetl, but only because of Azarya. It was because of Azarya that she’d overcome her aversion and reconnected with her extended family and with the Rebbe. Cass had enlisted her help ten years ago, in her capacity as a school psychologist, when he and Roz had realized the nature of the Rebbe’s son.

Three years ago, Azarya had turned thirteen, the age that marks the end of childhood for an observant Jewish male.

Cass hadn’t been able to go to Azarya’s Bar Mitzvah, since he couldn’t very well take Pascale to New Walden—it would have been overwhelming for her—and he hadn’t wanted to leave her at home. In fact, he hadn’t seen Azarya in years. It was his mother who kept him up to date. The festivities for Azarya’s Bar Mitzvah had lasted an entire week, with all of New Walden, as well as many Hasidim from other sects, participating. Azarya’s birthday was in May, and the streets of New Walden had overflowed with celebration, the Valdeners dancing beneath the lilacs.

His mother had gone to the opening event. She’d planned to go to more, arranging to stay over with her cousin Shaindy for the Shabbes that would crown the tumult, but realized that she couldn’t take any more of it, not even for Azarya’s sake. And she couldn’t get close to him anyway, claustrated as she was in the curtained-off women’s section. The event she had attended had begun with the Rebbe and Azarya handing out awards to Valdener students who had excelled in special examinations that had been given in honor of the Bar Mitzvah. Each of the children came up to the dais, where the Rebbe and his son stood, and picked up a plastic cup of grape juice, whose contents had been mingled with a cup from which the Rebbe himself had sipped, toasted
l’chaim
—to life— and then received a holy book, the difficulty of which varied with the student’s age.