The Outsider (10 page)

He put it to the board as he had put it to Lucy, and most of them stared at him blankly. The board now consisted of twelve people, even though the week-to-week business of the synagogue was still conducted by Osner, Hurtz, and Klein. Osner was nominally the president of the synagogue, and though the charter called for election of a president and other officers every two years, the matter had been postponed for three weeks now. Two other members of the board were available on short notice, Eddie Frome, thirty-one years old, a writer who had made the transition from
Yank
to
The New Yorker
magazine, and Oscar Denton, seventy-one years old and the first Jew to live in Leighton Ridge. David invited Alan Buckingham, which caused Osner to take David aside and inquire why Buckingham was there.

“I have my reasons,” David said.

“You don't want to share them?”

“I will, later.”

“That's a little arrogant, Rabbi. I would think that, in a matter like this, it ought to be kept among our people.”

“Alan's a member of the congregation. That makes him our people.” And after calling the meeting to order, David said to them, “You've all had the opportunity to look at the swastikas, and I asked Jack to get a few of us together this evening so that we could decide what to do about it. You see Alan Buckingham, who's not a member of the board and who in a literal sense is not Jewish, although his family does belong to the congregation. Coming out of this ghastly war that we've all lived through, we named our congregation Shalom. We could hardly have named it anything else, and I'd like us to keep that in mind when we talk tonight. We're all angry, but we have a problem that we can't solve with anger. I want to point out something else, which touches on Alan Buckingham's presence. The swastikas were painted not only on a synagogue, but on a church, and not on any church, but on a New England Congregational church, one of a group of ancient churches that defined so much of what this country would be. And whether or not whoever did this intended it, a church was desecrated as much as a synagogue.”

“I don't agree with that,” Osner said. “The bastards who did the job were desecrating a synagogue, not a church.”

“Still and all,” Frome said, “the rabbi has a point. The building was a church, and even though we hold services there, it remains a church in a manner of speaking. Certainly, when we sell it to the Unitarians, it will become a church again — if they call it a church?”

“They do.”

“I don't know what the devil we're doing, meeting about this,” Osner said. “This kind of an outrage against Jews is as old as time. To hell with it! We paint over it and forget about it.”

“I don't think we can forget about it,” Mel Klein said slowly. “We live here. It's too close to the Holocaust.”

The old man, Oscar Denton, said, “When we moved in here, twenty years ago, we were the first Jewish family to settle in Leighton Ridge. At first, it never occurred to them. Maybe the thought was impossible up here in the year nineteen twenty-eight. And since I was a builder and worked alongside my men, maybe it didn't occur to them because it conflicted with their concept of what a Jew should be. So they were pretty nice to us until they found out, and then they made life pretty rotten for my kids and uncomfortable for us. But nothing overt. They don't burn crosses on the Ridge, and nothing like this business of the swastikas ever happened. I would not paint over them. I would make a point of them. I would call in the newspapers from Danbury and from New Haven and from Hartford too, and the
New York Times,
yes, absolutely. Let them take pictures so people won't get smug and say it can't happen here.”

“For God's sake,” Joe Hurtz exclaimed, “why are we making this kind of a fuss over the actions of some stupid kids? Paint it over and forget about it. Kids see things. They imitate. So what?”

“No,” Mel Klein muttered. “No —no way.”

“I'd like to hear from Alan,” David said.

“I've been listening,” Alan said, “and of course I saw the swastikas. I'm not Jewish, but I'm married to a Jewish lady whom I love dearly and I have two Jewish kids. It puts me kind of close to the problem, but not as close as you are. At the same time, I can't help being astonished by the calm manner in which you discuss this. I was silent but raging inside myself. Damnit, Joe, what do you mean, stupid kids? If some idiot killed your child, would you dismiss it because it was the act of an idiot? And do you think Nazism was the product of the brains and culture of Germany? I can tell you it was the product of all the stupid, demented rot that existed in Germany. And a church was defaced, not merely a synagogue, so if there was ever a time to bring Jew and Christian on the Ridge together on a very serious matter, this is it. I would bring Martin Carter into this right away. That's only a suggestion. I'm not a member of the board.”

“To me, you're making a mountain out of a molehill,” Osner said. “This is our affair, not Martin Carter's.”

Denton and Klein and Eddie Frome said they agreed with Buckingham, and together with David, they made a firm majority.

“I'll just talk to Martin,” David said. “We'll see what he suggests.”

“I'm disagreeing with Jack Osner too much,” he told Lucy that night as they settled down in bed. “I think he's beginning to hate my guts.”

“You have more politics here than in Washington.”

“In a manner of speaking — yes, we do.”

“Did you think it would be that way?”

“No — no, I never dreamed that it would. I guess the war spoiled me for common sense. The kids were always so glad to see a rabbi — oh, the devil with it, Lucy. If they fire me, they fire me.”

“And what about Mike Benton?”

“He's frightened. He could live with war, but jail scares him. He's been subpoenaed by the Un-American Committee, and they'll ask him to name names, same as with the others. It's only three years since Adolf Hitler died in his bunker in Berlin, and we're trying every trick of his on the home ground.”

“Come on, it's not as bad as all that.”

“It's as bad.”

News travels in a small place like Leighton Ridge, and the next morning Martin Carter turned up at the old parsonage. Lucy was feeding Aaron, and David was having his second cup of coffee. “I sometimes do the breakfasts,” he explained. “She feeds my son and heir, although being a rabbi's heir is not much to boast about. Let me cook up some eggs for you.”

Carter declined and accepted a cup of coffee. “I heard about the swastikas,” he said.

David waited.

“Nothing like this ever happened before,” Carter said. “I've been here a long time.
Nothing
like this ever happened before. Sure, we have our Jew-haters, but show me a small town in America that doesn't have them. Ours have always been pretty mild.”

“I think it's kids,” David said, “but we can't drop it and let it pass just because they're kids.”

“Oh, no. It's a very particular desecration. Selling the old church to your people was, I felt, a significant act of brotherhood, very necessary after the Holocaust — but the building remains an old church, a sort of monument to our beginnings here in America. We can't allow this to pass quietly, David, and simply paint over the swastikas and pretend it never happened.”

“What do you suggest?”

“I think we ought to have a joint service, perhaps in midweek. We won't use any church. I can get the Board of Selectmen to let us have the meeting hall, and we'll make it an open affair. I think each of us ought to say a few words there.”

“Very few for me,” David said. “I think you carry the burden.”

As with so many small Connecticut towns, the legislative part of the government was the town meeting. Basic changes in the town's criminal and civil code were brought to the town meeting, as well as zoning questions and restrictive covenants. Attendance was never compulsory, but neither was this night's kind of attendance very common, the seven hundred seats in the hall filled, with people in the aisles and standing in back. At this point everyone in town and in the surrounding towns and cities, and in New York too, knew about the swastikas.

Todd Burns, the town manager, opened the meeting by saying that all of the selectmen wanted to be speakers here tonight, but they decided to leave the issue to the two men of the cloth involved, Rabbi Hartman and the Reverend Carter.

Rabbi Hartman felt strange. He still had to nerve himself to speak to his congregation, and here was a larger and mixed group. “For the first time,” he said, “I knew how the Negro felt when he looked out of his window and saw a burning cross in front of his house. But I don't fully know how the Reverend Martin Carter felt when he saw this desecration on the oldest symbol of democracy this country has, the Congregational church. The people and the movement that raised up these symbols, the symbol of the hooked cross, caused the deaths of fifty million human beings and the crippling of a hundred million more. No one can ever calculate the suffering they brought upon mankind. Does anyone want us to create a similar movement here at home? I am still fairly new in Leighton Ridge. Martin Carter has been here much longer. He has agreed to talk about this.”

Carter said, “When Rabbi Hartman called us the oldest symbol of democracy this country has, he was quite correct. The Pilgrims built our first church in America, holding that a man needs no intercessor before his God, that each man is responsible for his deeds, his sins, and his cruelties, and that his church is a symbol of a man's dignity, his independence, and his willingness to participate in the democratic process. That is why, years ago, when we were a much smaller town than we are now, the town meetings were held in the Congregational church, which was as often called the meeting house as it was the church. When the time came to forsake the old church, which would no longer hold our congregation, I wondered what would become of it. We are not affluent enough to turn the church and the parsonage into a museum and maintain such a museum — yet this should be done. For the church was built in the seventeen seventies, and the parsonage is even older. How could we face the thought of these two beautiful old buildings being torn down —”

Lucy, sitting with Della Klein, whispered, “He's forgotten what it takes to keep that beautiful old building warm in winter.”

“— but fortunately, we never faced that. Three of our Jewish neighbors came to me and asked whether they could buy the church for a synagogue and the parsonage as a home for the rabbi they hoped to find. Of course, I was delighted. It was like an act of hope and faith, a prayer answered, and when I put it to the entire congregation, they were pleased, too. We felt that it was a God-given opportunity to affirm our faith in Christianity, so sorely shaken these past years, and to perform an act of brotherhood toward the most bitterly hounded and persecuted people on earth — yet the same people from whom God chose his Son. And now we have this act of mindless desecration. I think that tonight, by coming here and packing this place, we have performed the first act of an exorcism. As for the second part of the exorcism, that will be performed tomorrow, starting at ten in the morning. I know that most men will be at work, but women can perform it equally well. The Jewish congregation, needing larger quarters for Temple Shalom, have sold the church and the parsonage to the Unitarians, who are quite desperate for a house of prayer. But we cannot hand it over in its present condition. So at ten o'clock tomorrow, armed with paintbrush and good outside white paint, we will meet at the church and complete the exorcism. Frank Hessel, our in-church painter, tells me it will require three coats for a proper job, and he suggests outside white lead. And we'll pray to God that we have seen the last of that unholy symbol.”

The next morning, wielding a paintbrush next to Millie Carter, and keeping an eye on Aaron and a dozen other toddlers, being watched over by two teen-agers, Lucy wondered what it all amounted to. “What do you think?” she asked Millie.

“I don't know. I've been a preacher's wife too long. I can't listen, no matter how hard I try. But you?”

Lucy shook her head.

“Come on. Whatever you say to me is privileged. You know that.”

“Okay. I would have said, ‘We have almost a thousand people here. Let's find the bastards who did this and whale the living daylights out of them and then turn them over to the cops.'”

“You're kidding.”

“Am I? Do you know anyone who ever prayed himself out of the gas chambers? I'm all for sweetness and light, but a good kick in the tail sometimes leaves a longer impression.”

•

PART THREE

1951

•

Y
ou're only going for three days,” David said. “There's enough there for a permanent departure.”

“What's that? Some kind of Freudian slip?”

“Come on, Lucy.”

“All right, I'm sorry. I'm packing enough for the two kids and myself. Sarah is only two, but still she has the right to a change of clothes. She'll be the youngest flower girl there, and we may stay a day or two extra. They have a huge house and we'll be very comfortable with my Aunt Dorothy — as you would be too, if you would only come. You have at least a dozen men in the synagogue who are just dying for you to take off so that they can conduct the service and show how classy their Hebrew is.”

“I suppose so.”

“And I just can't buy your excuse.”

“It's not an excuse,” he said with annoyance. “Do I have to run through it again? You come from an atheist family —”

“You knew that when you married me.”

“I know, and I'm not talking about you. But here's your cousin John, Jewish from the word go, marrying a Jewish girl, and the ceremony is being performed by a justice of the peace.”