The Outsider (16 page)

“That's pretty cynical.”

“I'm cynical. Let's go to bed and make love.”

The following day, David drove over to Mike Benton's house. A quarter cord of wood had been delivered and dumped in the front yard. Mitzie, in jeans and sweater, was carrying it inside.

“Hello, Rabbi,” she said. “It's going to be a long, cold winter.”

David picked up an armload of wood and followed her into the house. Neat and clean, without Benton's deliberate slovenliness, the house was even less attractive; and Mitzie, noticing his glance, said, “It makes me cringe, Rabbi. Well, he'll be out in six months, and then we'll head for California. I wish sometimes we hadn't taken almost three years of appeals. The end result would have been the same, and he'd be out by now. I never thought I would miss him so, and I never thought I could love a man so much.”

“I have a letter from Mike,” David said. “You know he can't write directly to you. It's rather terse, but when he settles down, I'm sure his letters will be longer and deeper. Let me bring in the rest of the wood while you read it.”

“Oh, no. I can't impose on you.”

“Please. I need the exercise.”

Later, having finished with the wood, and trying to start a fire, he looked up from where he was stuffing papers under the grate. Mitzie was crying.

“He's all right,” David said. “That's the main thing.”

“It's crazy.”

“Yes. A lot of things are.”

“He faced death over and over for his country. Have they forgotten that already, Rabbi? And then they put him in prison. He wasn't a communist. He went to their meetings because his friends went, but suppose he were a communist? Does he have to go to prison for not being an informer?”

“He'll hack it,” David said. “Then it's over and done with. I understand you're working.”

“I got a job selling stockings in a store in Danbury. It's all right. It's a job, and it's better than waiting tables. And Mike left enough money for the rent and other things.”

“Would you come for supper some evening?” David asked her.

“I'd love to. It's the first invitation I've had since Mike went to jail.”

At home that evening, Lucy, distracted, nodded and mumbled something about knowing Mitzie and liking her. Lucy was bathing little Sarah while David dried his son. At age four, Aaron gave promise of long limbs and red hair. Both children were articulate, and they were talking a blue streak under Lucy and David's words. Lucy was asking David whether he thought she looked Jewish.

“That's a new one. About this kid Mitzie. Can we have her to dinner next week?”

“Some women at the market decided that I was one of those miserable Jews who are spoiling the place.”

“What's a miserable jew?” Aaron asked.

“Let's get them down,” David said.

At the dinner table, Lucy said to him, “I miss the old house. I know it was falling apart, but it had some style. This so-called modern house they built for us is so ugly and stupid. It doesn't belong here.”

“That's not what creates anti-Semitism, Lucy. You know that. Before the war there was only a handful of Jewish families here in Leighton Ridge. Now there are a good many more.”

“It was just a stupid woman, but I never saw her before. It was like putting a knife into me. I had the children with me, and all I could think of was My darlings, my darlings, this was to be no part of your world.”

“It's no use thinking that way, Lucy. All the dirt and filth and hate has to be a part of their world. We'll try to shelter them and protect them, but they must live in the world.”

“It's a great world. I must say, when that God of yours fiddles with the planets, he puts together some beauties — and there I go again. I'm sorry, David. About Mitzie — yes, of course. I'll invite her to dinner. We'll try to cheer her up.”

“It's all right.”

She began to cry. He walked around the table behind her chair and put his arms around her.

But the question came up again at the next board meeting of the synagogue. Joe Hurtz brought up the issue of increasing anti-Semitism. He had a men's haberdashery store in Dan-bury, and, as he put it, he had his ear to the ground.

“Still and all,” old Oscar Denton pointed out, “Danbury is not Leighton Ridge. Not only is it a good distance away, but there were a lot of Jews mixed up in the hat business in the old days and that might have left some nastiness.”

“I hear talk,” Joe Hurtz said. “It's not only Danbury. It reaches over here.”

“It's something Jews have lived with a long time,” David said. “Like the weather, we can talk about it, but we can't do much to change it.”

“I agree with David,” Mel Klein said. “We got more important things. We got the Israel Bond drive on the agenda, and we still got the question of a crèche for the preschool kids. That's going to cost a small bundle.”

“Don't drop it so quickly,” Jack Osner said. “Anti-Semitism is not like a hurricane. It's not an act of God. The two atom spies played their part — the two most notorious spies of our time, engaged in the most damaging piece of espionage, and both Jewish—”

“Come on,” Oscar Denton interrupted, “they did a little less than that. They passed on some drawings of the implosion mechanism, something I could build myself, given enough time. They were stupid and disloyal, but so was Ezra Pound, and no one talks of executing him.”

Ed Frome, the magazine writer, was intrigued and said to the old man, “Come on, Oscar, you're a contractor. I mean you build houses. This thing —”

“They didn't steal the secret of making the bomb,” Denton told them. “That's no secret. What they passed on was a diagram of the mechanism that sets off the bomb. You don't explode an atomic weapon the way you do a charge of dynamite. You have to turn your pellets of uranium into critical mass, and to do that you need what they call an implosion, pellets directed in instead of out. Sure I could make it. Oh, I'd have to hire some machinists for the fine work, but I could make it.”

“Goddamnit, Oscar,” Osner said, “you're the last person I'd expect to deliver a defense of those two miserable traitors.”

“I'm not defending them,” Denton said quietly. “I'm explaining what they did.”

“Well, I don't buy your explanation.”

“Let's get down to business,” Mel Klein urged.

Osner persisted. “What I said goes. And it doesn't help that a member of this congregation is serving time as a communist right now.”

“Oh, please, Jack,” David said. “You know better than that. You're a lawyer. Mike Benton is in there because he wouldn't name names, because he wouldn't be an informer.”

“Whatever, he's a communist and he doesn't belong in this congregation. I think it would be a positive gesture to expel him.”

“What!”

“I never thought you were a nice guy, Jack,” Ed Frome said, “but I also never took you for such a consummate son of a bitch.”

“You can't talk to me like that!” Osner shouted.

“Stop it!” Denton snapped. “Grown men acting like kids. We're a board of a synagogue, and we're entitled to different opinions — Jack's as well as yours, Ed. So let's cool this whole thing and talk sense.”

“And did they talk sense?” Lucy wanted to know, after David told her about the squabble.

“Not very much. The question of the creche was tabled for a meeting of the entire board. Oscar Denton, you know, the old man who was the biggest contractor in New Haven, well, he's pretty liberal and open-minded. But on this he just froze up. I think the word itself annoyed him. It's the word Christians use for their models of the Nativity scene — the stable, the Christ Child, and Mary.”

“Good heavens, he's not Orthodox.”

“People aren't consistent, Lucy, and Oscar is the wealthiest man in the congregation. You know, the Episcopal church has a creche and so has Martin Carter's church, and Oscar feels we're aping them. It's expensive, not only for the initial establishment, but we need two teachers who have been trained in prekindergarten work. Yet more and more, we're getting young people in the congregation, and when the mother and father both work, it's a problem.”

“I don't suppose we could even consider putting our two kids in the Congregational creche?”

“Over my dead body.” David grinned. “And there are at least twenty members of the congregation who'd make sure it was very dead.”

It was at moments like this, when they were very relaxed and sharing things, that David considered telling Lucy the whole story of his encounter with Sarah Comstock. He resisted the impulse, just as he had resisted the impulse to ask Lucy about the cookbook. But Lucy told him finally, and he registered appropriate surprise and excitement. They had even found a publisher. His expressions of delight, however, did not lessen his guilt.

Sarah had called David's office at the synagogue twice. The calls were taken by Mrs. Shapiro, David's new and first secretary, part time but kindly and efficient. She was from Bridgeport and had not been around the Ridge long enough for the name Comstock to mean anything, or to be curious as to why a Sarah Comstock was calling the rabbi.

After a week had gone by, David thought that he had to return the calls. Guilty though he felt, he wanted desperately to see Sarah Comstock again, enough to overcome the guilt. He telephoned her during the day, and she asked him to meet her, if he could, at Brandywine Lake, about twelve miles north of Leighton Ridge. “I'll be at the boathouse at three,” she said. “It's closed down for the winter. No one goes there at this season.”

David telephoned Lucy, once again with a lie, telling her that he was driving to New York for a meeting at the Institute. It was not only that Lucy was totally trusting; she was also apparently incapable of suspicion, and David wondered how any man could carry on an extramarital affair if he was married to a trusting woman.

He parked at the lake. The weather had turned cold, and he buttoned his coat as he scuffed through the dry leaves. Sarah was sitting on a bench outside the boathouse, wrapped in a huge sweater. There was not another soul in sight. She rose as he came up to her and stood facing him, and after a long moment of hesitation, he put his arms around her and kissed her.

“I want you to know, dear David,” she said quickly, “that I understand our situation completely. You will never leave your wife and daughter and son, and even if you were unencumbered, I am not sure you would want to marry me. There is no open door for us, no way out.”

He held her face between his palms, staring at her.

“Is there?”

“No,” he said.

“Do you love me, David?”

“I think of you day and night. I want to be with you more than anything in the world.”

“We're neither of us very strong, and I think we're both frauds. Otherwise, I'd leave my husband, and you —” Her voice trailed away.

“I'm not that strong,” David admitted.

“I won't see you again, David darling. Please help me not to see you again. If I call, don't answer or return it.”

He couldn't speak. Hand in hand, they walked over to where their cars were parked.

About six weeks later, sitting at the breakfast table with the
Leighton Clarion
in front of her, Lucy asked David, “Did you know Sarah Comstock?”

“I met her at the Carters' when you were down in Jersey for the wedding. Why do you ask?”

“She killed herself yesterday. An overdose of sleeping tablets. What a shame — such a beautiful woman. There's a picture of her here.” Lucy offered him the paper, but he ignored it, rose, and walked out of the room. He went upstairs to the bathroom, locked the door, put his face in his hands, and wept. When Lucy came upstairs and knocked at the door and asked him if he was all right, he managed to say “Yes, as all right as I'll ever be.”

•

PART FOUR

1952

•

L
ucy's father had given David and Lucy a television set, a gift for their sixth wedding anniversary. Lucy was delighted with it; David's view of it was somewhat dim and uncertain, and he had a feeling that this small box was the beginning of a change that was open ended. Tonight, dressing to go to dinner at the Osners', David listened unhappily to the chatter of the box downstairs. His two children and the baby sitter were watching television, silent and enthralled.

“Don't you think your father might have felt the same way about the coming of radio?” Lucy asked, tired of his television-inspired foreboding.

“Possibly.”

“And since your congregation is going to have television sets, doesn't it behoove you to have one and know what it does?”

“You have a point.”

“I know it has its crazy side,” Lucy said, “but so has everything else. Just suppose God sent a messenger to earth.”

“God doesn't send messengers to earth.”

“How do you know? All right, I don't believe very much in God, but the Talmud is full of stories about messengers to earth. And how about Passover? Isn't the Prophet Elijah supposed to slip down to earth from his heavenly place and join some
Seder
table?”

“This is going somewhere, isn't it?” David said. “I mean we're not having a theological argument — or are we?”

“That's your department. Here, zip me up the back. No, I was thinking Mark Twain style. Did you ever read ‘Captain Stormfield Visits Heaven'?”

“No.”

“Well, Captain Stormfield gets distracted as he flashes through the universe and he misses the gate he should go to and arrives at a gate where they never heard of the Planet Earth. Well, they got a map about a thousand miles high, and they have angels scurrying all over the map trying to find the earth, and finally one of them locates something, but he can't decide whether it's a fly speck or a planet.”