The Outsider (18 page)

“I didn't mean to burden you with all that,” David said.

“I know.”

He kissed her, and her response was perfunctory. She rose and went into the bathroom to clean her face. David followed her. Watching him in her mirror, she said, “Maybe you would have been happier with Sarah Comstock. Maybe she would have understood you. Maybe she would be alive today if she could have been your wife.”

“My God,” David whispered. “How long have you known?”

“Since last year. I never meant to tell you. Sarah told Millie, and Millie talked to me about it. Millie thought it would go on and make mincemeat out of our lives and our marriage, but then that poor woman killed herself — and all I knew was that I still had you, and David, I love you so much, so much —” She was crying again. He took her in his arms and held her tightly.

It snowed that night, and in the morning there were six inches of virgin white on the hills of Leighton Ridge. David shoveled a path to the road, followed closely by his two children and their dog, all of them delighted with the rewards of winter. His house was a hundred yards from the synagogue, much of the walk covered by drifted snow over a foot high. David was pleased to see three youthful volunteers clearing the way. For the next eight months, he would be at the synagogue every morning at eight o'clock. In the normal course of things, David, like a good many Reform rabbis, did not hold daily services, but when Dr. Henry Levine's mother passed away, he put the problem to David. “I won't rest easily unless I say the mourner's
Kaddish.
She was very
frum.
I'm not, but I adored her, David. So which is it? Do I drive all the distance to Bridgeport, with my office in Westport, or do we work out a
minyan
?” — a
minyan
being the company of ten men required for a service.

Not only did David like Henry Levine as a person, but each time Lucy called him frantically to minister to one of the children, he stubbornly refused to accept payment. Whereupon, David immediately agreed to the
minyan.
That had been four months ago, each morning a desperate struggle to corral ten Jews of appropriate age and sex. The fact that the ten congregants required for the
minyan
were limited by Jewish law to the male sex drove home the foolishness and waste of male chauvinism; but on the other hand, whenever David brought up the possibility of women being included in the
minyan,
the Orthodox and Conservative members of his congregation objected so violently that he let the matter drop.

On this morning of the snowfall, they were short the proverbial tenth man. For a while, they were at the point of desperation, with Dr. Levine driven to the extremity of calling a number of his patients, but even the sick ones had struggled out of bed to go to work. Then, happily, David remembered the two volunteers who always turned up to shovel a path from the parking lot to the synagogue, each of them fifteen years old — males of an age to be admitted —
Bar Mitzvahed
in this very temple.

When the morning service was over, David went outside, to find Martin striding energetically down the road past the synagogue. David called out, “Hold on a bit, Martin. I'll walk with you.”

For a few minutes they strode on in silence, kicking through the snow and emitting clouds of frosty breath; then David said, “I don't know how to get into this, so I might as well plunge. Last night, Lucy told me she knew about me and Sarah Comstock, and that she had known since it happened.”

“There wasn't much to know, David.”

“I've been eating myself up with the question of how responsible I was for what happened.”

“It was her seventh suicide attempt in three years. She was gifted, beautiful, and brilliant, and it wasn't Harvey's drinking that drove her to it. He lives with worse guilt than yours. Don't think that you Jews have a monopoly on guilt. I could show you shades of white Protestant guilt that you never even dreamed of.”

“Then why did she do it?”

“God knows.”

They walked on, taking a path through a clump of woods that separated the new synagogue from the old Congregational church that was now the Unitarian church. The snow began to fall again, small, unhurried flakes that gave promise of a long, deep snowfall. “In Maine,” Martin said, “where I grew up, it would begin like this, and then go on for hours. Not a breath of wind. Just a holy stillness.”

“It's strange,” David said, “how completely you people have united Christianity with winter and snow. Have you ever been to Israel?”

“Someday, David, the four of us will go together.”

“I'd like that. But it's hot there, sunbaked and hot. I remember a snowstorm in New York when all the traffic stopped. Nothing moved. What am I doing, Martin? This is a crazy pretense. We're walking through the snow as if it's some impossible stage set. Oh, Jesus Christ, what frauds we are!”

“Jesus Christ — I never heard you say that before.”

“Don't make anything of it,” David said sourly.

Martin looked at his watch. “In a half-hour, they'll be dead.”

“You know Mike Benton?” David asked, as if he had not heard Martin at all.

“I met him once, yes.”

“He was an odd case, a valid war hero who was terrified of prison. Well, he made it, all right; got through six months, and it wasn't as awful as he had imagined it would be, except for the first eleven days.”

“Why the first eleven days?”

“Because they were spent in Washington, D.C., penitentiary — from all I've been told, an old pesthole of a prison, tier upon tier of cells, electric gates, solitary confinement for any step out of line, prisoners eating in silence in the well at the bottom of the cell block. Well, the warden of the prison has a sense of humor and he hates reds, so for the eleven days Mike was there, a sort of staging period, the warden had him in death row.”

“What a rotten thing to do!”

“Ah, yes, there's a lot of rotten around. But the point is that Mike insists that no one who has not experienced something of what he went through those eleven days can properly understand the meaning of capital punishment. He slept very little those eleven nights. The screaming, sobbing, and various vocal terrors of the condemned men kept him awake.”

They walked on in silence. The snowfall became heavier. Martin Carter looked at his watch again and said, “Ten minutes more.”

“Damn you, Martin!” David exclaimed. “Damn you! What are you, some kind of ghoul?”

“No, David, it's just that there are certain things a
goy
can't understand no matter how hard he tries. Yes, I am sick and disgusted at what is happening a few miles from here at Sing Sing Prison, where in a few minutes two people will be put to death. These two so-called atom spies are not being executed because they are spies, but because they are Jewish. I know it. You know it. And every Jew in America whose head isn't buried under five feet of sand knows it. And Millie's brother Sam, the one who's a congressman from Springfield, he tells us that the F.B.I. at first used the threat of a death sentence to get them to implicate others, and then the President picked it up and pressured the judge. So I know that, and Millie knows that, and probably most members of Congress know that — and yet the Jewish community in America is as silent as the night. Not a word —”

“There have been words,” David protested.

“Whispers, whispers. We are less than ten years from the Holocaust, and this symbolic slaughter and sacrifice to all the dark gods takes place in silence — that's what I don't understand, the silence.”

David looked at his own watch, and he said mournfully, “They're dead, Martin.”

The snow was so heavy now that it was like a curtain between the two men, and David said to Martin, his voice hoarse, “What Mike Benton said about death row, you see, Martin, my friend and Congregational minister, think about it, think about it, because we have been on death row for two thousand years.”

Martin stared at David, a ghostly figure behind the curtain of snow. He started to speak and then swallowed his words. And then, after a long moment, he said, “Let's get home, David. The snow's a foot deep already.”

They clumped on home through the snow in silence. David's house was first along the way, and he urged Martin to come in for some hot tea, but Martin said no, he had a lot of thinking to do, and he might as well start on it right now.

Giving David hot tea and dry socks, Lucy saw the grief on his face and asked him, “What is it, David? What happened? Is it the execution?”

“All during the war,” he said slowly, “we believed that we were on the edge of change. In one way or another, we all believed that. We had tracked the devil to his lair, and now it only remained to go in and destroy him. Then the world would be different. But, you know, it won't be any different, Lucy, it never will.”

“Perhaps not, but you still have your post-
Bar Mitzvah
class in Talmud this afternoon, and you're always telling me what a mind-bender it is. How about a hot bath and a good lunch? Hamburger and home fries.”

“You're kidding?”

“No — I have the hamburger in the fridge. You can bet I'm not going out in that snow.” But as soon as David was in the tub, Lucy called Millie Carter and asked her, “What on earth happened with the two of them, out there in that snowstorm?”

“I can't get a word out of Martin.”

“Same here.”

“Give it a little time,” Millie said.

Lucy fed the children first and then did something unusual for her. She put them in front of the television so that she might have a quiet hour with David. He had many gifts, but a subtle and sophisticated taste for food was not one of them, and as he once explained to her, he had practically grown up on hamburgers and home fries. But he had no appetite today. “Will you forgive me, Lucy, please. It's wonderful and it smells marvelous, and I can't eat it.”

She got up and came around the table and kissed him.

“What's that for?”

“Just one of those things. Coffee?”

He drank the coffee and munched a piece of bread. “No one should have to face an executioner,” he said. “It's a mean, ugly vengeance that we exact. I sometimes wonder whether we are sane, any of us, any of the human race.” He shook his head. “What are we doing here, Lucy?”

“You know what I'm going to do,” she said. “I'm going to put a dollar in the cookie jar every time you ask me that question. It'll pay for a trip abroad.”

“It's just that wherever I look, I seem to see something demented. I want it to be them, so that I could say to myself, they're demented, but we're sane. You know Leon Kramer?”

“His wife, poor thing, is constantly pregnant. Four children, and a fifth on its way.”

“Appears to be a very nice fellow, but very Orthodox. To him, we are only one step to the left of the Catholic Church —”

“Come on,” Lucy said.

“Well — almost. Reform Judaism, in his lights, has already made a pact with the devil. He feels that he's our conscience, and that's why he continues as a member. You notice, he always has a
yarmulke.
Last week he came to me for an
eruv.
”

“What on earth is an
eruv
?”

“Well, according to the strictures of the Orthodox Jews, on the Sabbath — from sundown on Friday to sundown Saturday — nothing can be carried out of the house. The act of pushing a baby carriage is considered to be carrying, so when one has an absolute need to give the baby a little sunshine and fresh air, an
eruv
is created, a symbolic area that extends the house. You do this by enclosing an area with a string, say as big as the front yard and back yard, and lo and behold, it becomes your house, and baby can be wheeled out without breaking the Law.”

“You're kidding.”

“I am not kidding. I am demonstrating insanity — harmless, but still beyond the pale of reason, and no more insane than a thousand laws and strictures of every other religion. There are whole areas of New York that have been enclosed with a string for an
eruv
— well, we're not so special, but God help me, I put myself here. Does God distinguish between those two so-called atom spies and the six million Jews cremated in Hitler's ovens? The world goes on. God is busy trying to sort out the souls of those cremated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the ashes of the camps — or does a soul remain after you've been seared into nothingness —”

“Stop it!” Lucy cried. “What are you doing? What are you doing to me, to you?”

“I'm sorry,” David said. “I'm sorry.”

That night he awoke screaming, and his screams awakened Lucy and the children. Sarah ran into Aaron's room and huddled under the covers with him. Lucy shook David awake and then held him tightly in her arms. She knew about the dream; she knew its content so well she might have dreamed it herself. In life, at the time, David had stood at the edge of the open grave where the bodies of three thousand Jewish dead had been flung, the bodies naked, men and women together, starved almost to death before being murdered, the skin clinging tight to the bones, arms and legs askew, faces like skulls with features ineptly painted, and out of the huge open grave came the dreadful, unbearable stink of rotting flesh. So it had been, as David told her, when Captain David Hartman, chaplain in the 45th Division of the Seventh Army stood at the edge of the open grave; but in the recurrent dream, always the same, David was one of the bodies in the grave, looking up at the American soldiers who stood on the grave's edge.

He opened his eyes, shivering, sweating. “I was in both places this time,” he whispered, “in the grave and outside, looking down. That was too terrible.”

“It's all right now,” Lucy whispered. “It's all right. It's just a dream.”