36 Arguments for the Existence of God (48 page)

Her intonation is so British that it’s hard to believe she grew up near Philadelphia.

“Surely you can’t believe that. I’m not capable of feeling competitive with you.”

“Well, if it wasn’t competitiveness, it was still insensitivity of monstrous proportions. Did you never stop to consider how it might make me feel, given my professional situation at the moment?”

Her face has assumed a look of frigid hauteur that he’s never seen before, no matter how much contempt she’s displayed toward members of their department.

“I had thought of the offer from Harvard as being something good for both of us.”

“Well, that is, to put it generously, bizarre beyond belief. How could
your
professional success possibly be interpreted as benefiting
me
? Ah, wait. I think I see. I hadn’t pegged you as yet another
man
who just doesn’t get it, but I am incurably naïve that way. You can’t possibly appreciate what it is like for me, how hard I have had to struggle to be taken seriously. It’s never enough, no matter how much I do. And now you think I shall be content to bask in your reflected glory.”

“That’s preposterous, your basking in my reflected glory. I would never dream of thinking that my work could even be compared to yours.”

“And it can’t. I don’t mean to be hurtful, I’m not that kind of person, but you and I both know that this boon you’re enjoying has nothing to do with science. I know that the psychology of religion is topical, but it’s soft,
and it’s shoddy, and if the world hadn’t suddenly gone mad on religion, no one would be lauding you like this. It’s deplorable that academia should prostitute itself, but there it is. Not even Harvard is above it. In fact, Harvard least of all, with that ludicrous delusion of self-importance that makes every Harvard professor feel he’s a public intellectual, qualified to comment on issues far beyond his expertise. You’ll do very well there.”

Lucinda, holding herself ramrod-straight, walks over to the bay window overlooking the street and peers out, and then comes back to Cass.

“I’m just watching for the cab. I’m spending the night at the Charles Hotel. I’ll get in touch with you about collecting my things.”

“You don’t think there’s anything for us to talk over? Your mind is completely made up?”

“This was only an experiment, as you know. I’d been explicit, from the very start. You can’t deny that.”

“Of course not.”

“Look, Cass, I wish you well. No matter what I might think about the injustices of academia, I have been trained to accept facts as facts. It was only rational of you to take advantage of the current interest in religion and to work the contemporary traumas to your self-interest. You’ve done well for yourself, and I’m happy for you. But I don’t respect what you do, and the fact that you have now acquired more prestige than I have, when my work is so much more important, is not something I can tolerate. I can’t degrade myself by being regarded as your female companion, the pretty young woman at the inferior institution who will be patronized by the Harvard elite. To be with you is to have everything that is wrong with academia constantly rubbed in my face.”

She walks again to the bay window.

“Ah, the taxi’s here.”

Cass goes to pick up her suitcase.

“I’ll take it myself.”

“But you’re so tired. At least let me help you down.”

“I’m not tired anymore. Goodbye, Cass. I’ll call you about my things.”

She goes down the steps, and as he hears the front door close, he darkens the living room so that he can see her more clearly outside in the night.

The driver emerges from the cab, taking her suitcase and her computer bag, and Cass can see her halo of pale hair catching the gleam of the streetlight as she turns back and carefully fastens the latch: “Please close the gate, remember our children.” The taxi drives off, and Cass hears a keening wail, the counterpart of the laughter that had risen like vapor off of his joy, only this, he thinks, is the sound of solemn sorrow, until he realizes it’s the kettle boiling.

Cass drives into New Walden in the late afternoon of a wind-lashed day. The clouds are streaming across the sky, shadow and shimmer rippling over surfaces. It makes the ground look as if it’s in motion, as if it’s a carpet unfurling underfoot.

There’s still more than an hour until the sun goes down, but the Valdeners are already out en masse, dressed in their Shabbes finery, the sartorial and tonsorial splendor of the men in full display. The winds coming off the Hudson are playfully pulling on
payess
and
kaputas
, and married women are laughing almost audibly as they hold on to their wigs and hats, their high spirits verging on disregard for the rules of female modesty.

The Costco House of Worship, gargantuan as it is, has been outgrown, and there’s an additional warehouse of a synagogue constructed right behind it and the happy Hasidim are streaming in that direction. The streets are too clogged with walkers for Cass to drive on farther. He leaves his car not far from the parking lot where the mismatched buses are jammed, and continues on foot.

Everyone Cass passes gives him a smile and a hearty
mazel tov
, and he answers in-kind.
Mazel tov
literally means “good luck” but is the phrase pronounced on someone to whom something fortunate has happened. You say
mazel tov
to a Bar Mitzvah boy and his family, to someone who gets engaged or gets married or has a baby.
Mazel tov
is the all-purpose response to all the good things, big and small.

There are lots of out-of-towners visiting this Shabbes. Cass can tell by the garb of the men. It’s only the Valdeners who wear the knee-high black boots with their britches. Other sects wear long black stockings, with their black knickerbockers tucked in, and still others do the same only with
white stockings, and still others let the bottoms of their pants extend over their socks. The Valdeners’ tradition of boots had derived from a compromise reached before a wedding, when the family of one side of the couple wore white stockings and the other side wore black.

The styles
of kaputas
and
shtreimlach
differ, too. Cass is hardly an expert at the semiotics of the sects, but he’s pretty sure there are a lot of Satmars, Belzers, and Bobovers. Even the Gerers are represented. There used to be a rift between the Valdeners and the Gerers, but this has been mended in recent years through the masterful diplomacy of the Valdener Rebbe.

The women and girls are less distinguishable. Cass thinks perhaps the other sects dress with a little more panache than the Valdeners, but this, too, takes a practiced eye, and when Cass is in New Walden he follows the mores and averts his eyes from females.

Cass is on his way to his brother’s house. It was when Jesse was, as they say, away, that he had found religion, or religion had found him. He had been visited by the Hasidim—not Valdeners but Lubavitchers, who have an outreach program for Jewish prisoners—and eventually he made his way back to New Walden, where he goes by his Hebrew name, Yeshiya.

Cass has to walk past the old Valdener synagogue to reach Jesse’s house, and the spectacle of masses of Hasidim converging as one has the convulsive effect on Cass it always does.

The likeness in attire is partially responsible. Cass may be able to pick out the subtle differences in hosiery between a Valdener and a Satmar, but the overall effect is of an undifferentiated mass of humankind, a category mistake that writhes with a life of its own, and Cass is never indifferent to it, no matter how well he understands the psychology behind his reactions.

The Friday-evening sun is descending behind those flitting clouds, and Cass is in a hurry to get to his brother’s house, but he pauses a moment in front of the Rebbe’s house to take in the scene, vibrating with kinetic men and boys rushing everywhere.

A little boy, blond and beautiful, about the age that Azarya had been when Cass had first met him, skips past him and lisps out a
mazel tov
in a shy soprano. The child’s face is flushed, his cheeks pomegranates of
excitement. If Cass were to stop him and ask him what he was feeling, what would he say?

I’m happy, of course, he would say. I’m happy.

And if the little boy were to ask what he, Cass Seltzer, the atheist with a soul, is feeling, standing stock still in the middle of the commotion, what would
he-
say?

He’d say what he’s been saying all along. That his Appendix was only an appendix, and that it has little to do with the text; and that the text is written not out there but in here, in the emotions that are so fundamental that we spread them onto a world of our imagining, or onto a world of our making, so that we end up beholding a world that is lavished with our own disgust at the uncleanliness that pollutes us, and with our yearning for a mythical purity that remains untouched, and with our vertiginous bafflement at the self that is inviolably me and here and now, and with our desperate and incomplete sense of the inviolable selves of the others that we need so crucially, and with our fear of all that’s unknown out there and that can hurt us, and with our suspicion that almost everything out there will turn out to be unknown and able to hurt us.

The little boy has disappeared into the throng entering the synagogue. In Cass’s reverie, he’s still there, speaking in the voice of Azarya, peeking his head around a half-open door and shyly announcing that he can read English now, and in that voice he now asks him: and then what happens?

This is what happens, Cass answers him. All of this. The rituals of purification; and the laws of separation, with
menner
on one
seit
and
froyen
on the other. The communities that define themselves in distinction from others, and the hatred in those others who can burn them alive. The young people clashing over sensuality and piety, and the dreams of our bodies or our souls outwitting death. The longings for redemption and for redeemers, and our imbuing others with the perfection that escapes us. The elected circle of disciples, and the ordeals that try their faith, and the sinner born again as a Hasid, a pious man. The signs and the portents of the coming of the Messiah, and the descent into madness of the false messiahs. The forces of our soul that press us outward and dissolve the boundaries of the self and burst us open onto the world, so that all of existence feels the way New Walden feels to a Valdener, an intimate world
that will embrace us in coherence and connection and purpose and love, and whose caring is no more open to doubt than is the Valdener Rebbe’s love for his own Valdeners.

The crowd in front of the synagogue is thinning, and the young men in the Rebbe’s front yard are no longer singing, and Cass hurries on. In three minutes, he can see the ramshackle two-family house where Jesse is living.

Cass is pretty sure his brother can afford better. He probably likes the shabbiness, because it exaggerates the discontinuity between his former life and this one. The front yard is littered with pastel plastic toys. The family that Jesse shares the two-family house with have the typical Ha-sidic brood. Cass wonders whether Jesse is going to find a Valdener girl and start having children himself. Their parents’ Volvo is parked in the unpaved driveway.

“You made it!” Cass’s mother greets him, as he stoops and she stands on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek.

“Of course I made it. Did you have any doubt?”

“How long did the drive take?” his father asks, the same question with which he’s been greeting him ever since Cass got his license.

Ben Seltzer used to be almost as tall as Cass himself, though he’s lost an inch or two. Cass’s mom is a bit less than average height, trim and athletic. She’s been a tennis player since her twenties, and she still looks like one in her late sixties. Her hair is gray now, and she wears it short and sensible, as she always has, except when Cass was very young, when her hair had flowed over her shoulders and down her back like a river of red. Jesse’s side locks and beard have emerged in the same vivid shade. Cass wonders whether he’ll ever stop having the urge to yank one of his brother’s
payess
to test whether they’re real. He has an image of Jesse detaching them every once in a while, taking time off from Valdenerism to connect with some model he’d dated in the past.

Their mother had been philosophical about Jesse’s becoming a
ba’al t’shuva
, a penitent who returns to the fold.

“If it will help quiet his troubled spirit, then how can I object? I’ve never understood him, and I don’t think you do either. Maybe, when it comes to your brother, Hillary was right. It takes a village.”

“Over four hours,” Cass answers his father. “I hit rush-hour traffic
coming over the Tappan Zee Bridge. And the winds are fierce. You could feel them slamming into the car.”

“I know. We almost went airborne coming in from New Jersey.”

“Where’s Jesse?”

“He’s already left,” his father says. “It’s going to be a mob scene, according to him.”

“It already is.”

“Let’s get going, then. We were just waiting for you.”

Ten minutes ago, Cass couldn’t get his car through, and now there are only a few stragglers on the streets. Cass’s mother obediently crosses to the
froyen seit
, without making a sarcastic comment.

“Look at that,” Cass’s father says. “She must be growing out of her rebelliousness.”

As they near the synagogue, Cass notices a thin young man in a long black wool coat and an elegant
shtreimel
on the women’s side, and then he looks again and it’s a tall young woman, and then he looks again and it’s Roz in her mink hat.

“Roz!” he calls out.

His mother hears him and goes up to her and says, “You’re not really Roz Margolis, are you?”

“I am!”

“My goodness. I’m Deb, Cass’s mother. I’ve been wanting to meet you for twenty years.”

“Me, too! That’s how long I’ve been waiting to meet you!” And she throws her arms around Deb, and the two women hug.