The Outsider (19 page)

She went into Aaron's room. The two little bodies were huddled under the covers.

“You know about bad dreams,” Lucy said. “Both of you have had bad dreams. Now Daddy had one.”

“He's dead,” Aaron moaned. “That's the way it sounds when you get dead.”

“That's the silliest thing I ever heard. David,” she called, “would you come in here.” To Aaron she said, “You can't see through the covers.”

The children poked their heads out. David came into the room and lifted Aaron in his arms. Then Sarah demanded to be lifted. Aaron decided he was afraid to go back to sleep.

“Then we'll all go downstairs and have hot milk.”

The children fell asleep drinking their milk, and David and Lucy carried them up to bed. Lucy, who was only an occasional smoker, wanted a cigarette very much now. She lit one and curled up on the bedroom lounge, an ancient upholstered chaise her mother had given her. David got back into bed and lay watching her, propped up on his elbow.

“Women suffer,” Lucy said, “but men suffer more.”

“Who told you that?”

“I figured it out.”

“That's pretty smart.”

“I don't think so. I think every lady knows it. That's why we forgive you for fucking up the whole damned universe.”

“You have to watch your language, baby. Not only am I a rabbi, but we have two little kids.”

“I use beautiful language only when we're alone. You know that. It comes when I am at a loss for other words because there are no other words that fit the case.”

“I've never seen you at a loss for words.”

“There's a lot about me you don't know.”

“Put away the cigarette and come in and lie next to me.”

In the morning, the snow had stopped, and Jack Osner's son, Adam, was digging out the Hartman walk — for which he was paid three dollars. “Well, Rabbi,” he said to David when David came to the door to pay him, “I guess this is the last time I do this for you. I'm not leaving you in the lurch, though. The Schwab kid is taking over from me. He doesn't have my class when it comes to tossing snow, but there it is. He's the best I can do.”

“I'm sure he'll learn.”

“Does it snow in Washington?”

“On occasion.”

“I hate to go. I really hate to go. I grew up here. My friends are here. You know something, Rabbi, the first kid I ever fought with for calling me a dirty Jew bastard, well, he's my best friend. Now I have to start all over again.”

“Oh, I don't know,” David said. “That's kid stuff. I don't think it will happen in Washington.”

When David got to the synagogue a half-hour later, Nash MacGregor was performing the same function, cutting a path through the foot-deep snow from Temple Shalom to the parking lot. MacGregor was a black man in his forties, tall, wide-shouldered, and strong. He lived in Bridgeport with a wife and three children, and he had worked for years in a box factory owned by a member of David's congregation. The factory was sold three years ago, and the new owner did not employ blacks. David needed a custodian for the new synagogue, and MacGregor was recommended to him. MacGregor was a good, hard-working man. Friday nights he slept over in the basement; other nights he went home. It was still a time when no black was permitted to live in any of the towns on the Fairfield County Ridge, something David became aware of only after he had hired MacGregor. There was a tiny cottage, an old farmhouse, on the edge of the synagogue property, and it occurred to David that this would be a convenient home for MacGregor and his family, sparing the black man the long ride to Bridgeport. It was on sale for six thousand dollars, and MacGregor assured David that he could get it in shape himself. “But they won't sell,” MacGregor said; “take my word for that, Rabbi.”

David put it up to the board. “No use,” Oscar Denton told him. “No way in the world, David. It's over twenty years since I came in here, first Jew, and it only worked because I bought the land first, and they all figured it was a development idea, never dreamed that I was a Jew and was going to live here.”

“We could buy the house and then rent it to MacGregor.”

They voted him down. As MacGregor had predicted. Mel Klein said, “You're right, David. You're a good man. But the world we live in is the world we live in. Don't make waves.”

Then what in God's name am I doing here? David asked himself, as he had a hundred times before.

This morning, MacGregor said to David, “Rabbi, the plow will be here in about an hour; but you know, if I had a blade on my pickup, I could clear that lot myself and save us twenty-five dollars each time it snows.”

“What would a blade cost?”

“I can get a nice one for about seventy-five dollars.”

“Get it and tell them to bill us.”

“I put the book back,” MacGregor added. “Can I take another?”

“Any time you wish.”

“Curious thing,” David said to Lucy that evening. “You know how Nash MacGregor sleeps over in the basement on Friday nights so that he can clean up and have things ready for the morning service? Well, time hangs heavy Friday nights during the service and I suppose later, too, so he asked me could he take a book from the library and read it. He's not a quick reader — has to mouth each word. I think he said he went to the fifth grade and then he had to go to work. But the first book he picked was Faulkner's
Requiem for a Nun,
which I happened to have on my desk. I don't know what he could have made of it, but he read it through to the end, and then he took Hersey's book
The Wall.
It takes him months, but he stays with them and finishes them, and each time he asks my permission to take another book.”

“Sometimes,” Lucy said to David, “I can see why you want to be what you are. But only sometimes,” she added quickly.

MacGregor was indebted. Being treated decently and with respect by whites was not so frequent an occurrence that he could take it in his stride. And he was an emotional man. Therefore, when he called David at eight o'clock in the morning on the Friday following the snowstorm, his voice shook and the words came with difficulty. “Rabbi, you better get over here right away. Something terrible happened.”

David was in the kitchen, setting the table for breakfast, while Lucy fried eggs and watched the toast. The children were already gulping their oatmeal. Lucy, one eye always on David's face, reading it, wanted to know what had happened.

“I don't know. Something at the synagogue.”

“Breakfast?”

“Later, perhaps.” He threw on his old army winter jacket and practically ran to the synagogue, where MacGregor was waiting outside the front door. To the left of the entrance, the brass letters that spelled out
TEMPLE SHALOM
were defaced with red paint, and all across the front of the building, spray-painted, were swastikas.

“Worse inside,” MacGregor said hopelessly.

Inside, the red spray paint was wildly spattered over the pews. The single, small stained glass window, behind the sanctuary, which depicted the tablets with the Ten Commandments, had been smashed, and an icy wind was blowing through the main hall. The curtains of the sanctuary had been ripped off, and the cover of the scroll of the Law, the Torah, had been ripped and defaced with the red paint.

“There it is,” MacGregor said woefully. “If I'd a been here, it wouldn't a happened. But I ain't here. I ain't here on Thursday, and I ain't seen nothing as terrible as this in a long time.”

“Not your fault, Nash,” David said. “It's not your fault at all.” He put his arm around the black man and stood there for a while, just staring at the devastation around him. “Tell you what, Nash,” he said, “first thing I want you to do is to get something to close up the hole in the stained glass window. I remember seeing some large pieces of cardboard in the Sunday school room.”

“They is pictures.”

“We can get more pictures. Main thing is to close up that hole as soon as possible.”

When the black man had gone, David replaced the scroll in the sanctuary. The scroll was one of the hundreds that the Nazis had taken from German and Polish synagogues and put aside for some future use. Rabbi Belsen had obtained this one through the Institute, and it was a gift to David's synagogue. He was staring at the torn, stained cover of the scroll when Mrs. Shapiro, his secretary, came through the door into the main hall and let out a scream.

“That's enough!” David said sharply. “Go into my office and start calling —” She was sobbing violently. “Please, Mrs. Shapiro, do you have a pencil and paper in your purse?” he shouted.

She found the pencil and paper. The sobs weakened under David's stern glance. Pencil and paper gave her weapons to face this unreasonable and threatening world.

“Call all the members of the board. Mr. Klein first — he doesn't leave before eight-thirty, so catch him — and then Mr. Hurtz, Mr. Denton, and Mr. Frome. And when you've called all of them and made sure they'll be here in the next hour, call the Reverend Carter at the Congregational church and tell him what happened and ask him to join us. And when the people come for morning service, have them wait.”

“Shall I tell the others what happened?”

“Briefly. Just say someone has vandalized the synagogue. Don't go into details. Now hurry.”

By nine-fifteen, they were all there, Martin Carter included, plus Mel Klein's son-in-law, a Dr. John Ash, who taught psychology at Yale. The mood varied. Hurtz was loud and angry, Klein was deeply worried, and Ed Frome was shocked and bitter. Martin Carter was horrified, and could not conceal his misery, a misery sharpened by the fact that he was the only Christian present. Oscar Denton alone was relaxed and apparently philosophical. “I am seventy-five,” he told them, “and past surprises. The human race does not improve, change, or show any evidence of a divine touch. You might say we've come of age in a world that's as uninventive as it is disgusting.”

“That kind of talk doesn't help,” Joe Hurtz said. “I wish Jack was here, but he isn't. I say we seen a crime, and we call the cops and make the bastards who did this pay for it. This is the U.S.A.; it ain't Germany.”

“Cops,” said Ed Frome. “We live in a very small town. We have five policemen, three on the day shift, two on the night shift, and they have all they can do to find their way home.”

“That's an exaggeration.”

“Have you ever seen our police force at work?”

“I say call the cops. Whatever they are, they're still cops.”

“What do you think, David?” Mel Klein asked him.

“I certainly don't think we should call in the police, not until we're able to discuss what happened with less emotion. It's not what was done here that disturbs us, but the memories it evokes. I've sent Nash MacGregor out for paint remover. The Torah was not damaged, and the window will be fixed. No one was injured, thank God.”

“It's still a matter for the police,” Hurtz insisted.

David turned to the psychologist. “How do you react to all this, Dr. Ash?”

“With disgust. On the other hand, it appears to me to be an act of adolescents, high school kids.”

“Why kids? Why not adults?”

“Because it's so quick and incomplete. I get the impression of a couple of kids with cans of red spray paint. Were the front doors forced?”

“No,” David said, “but we haven't locked them since the synagogue was built.”

“My guess is that these kids knew the doors were open. It was more of a prank than a gesture of anti-Semitism.”

“Like hell it was!” Martin Carter said vehemently and unexpectedly. “If you don't see this as an ugly, sick piece of anti-Semitism, then your head is in the sand.”

“Carter's right,” Frome said. “What the devil is wrong with us? I have to ask you that, Rabbi. I am just as angry as hell, and I'd like to take those young hoodlums and beat the living daylights out of them. Do you want to cover this up, pretend it never happened?”

“No, I don't want to cover it up,” David said, “but I also don't want it blown all out of proportion. I asked Reverend Carter to join us, not to increase our sensitivity to anti-Semitism, but because, like Dr. Ash, I felt that this was the work of kids, and the Reverend Carter, who knows the community better than any of us, might lead us to them.”

The meeting ended with a decision to inform the police chief, as he was euphemistically titled. The matter, they felt, had to be reported. The question of locking the doors in the future arose. David was strongly against it. “It's simply not an appropriate reaction,” he insisted. “Even if this should happen again, to lock the doors of a sanctuary is an awful admission of failure.”

“Failure for whom and whom do we admit it to?”

“To ourselves.”

The argument was short, and David won his point. For the time being, they agreed, they would not lock the doors.

Martin remained after the others had left. “You're damned angry at me, aren't you?” he said.

“Not very angry, no. Only —”

“Only, who the hell is this
goy
to give us lessons in anti-Semitism?”

“Something like that,” David admitted.

“Did it ever occur to you that there's a very basic difference between us on this question of anti-Semitism?”

“Oh? Tell me.”

“You were never an anti-Semite, David. I was. Rabidly. My father was a bigoted anti-Semite, maniacally so. He and two of his business associates became involved in Henry Ford's terrible swindle with the forged
Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
But my father believed them. In many ways, he was a kind man, but his whole being was saturated with this sickness of anti-Semitism. At first it captured me, then it horrified me, and in the end it was one of a number of things that turned me toward the ministry. That's a long story, and perhaps some other time, but I don't want you to hold against me what I said before. We're old friends, David, and I don't want anything to hurt that friendship.”