The Outsider (20 page)

“Nothing will,” David said.

The chief of police came in person, a gray-haired man in his middle sixties, and he prowled around and looked at the damage and nodded sagely. “Kids today,” he said, “God only knows what gets into them. What do you want me to do, Rabbi?”

“Catch them, I suppose.”

“Won't be easy. Lots of folks have prejudice. It ain't Germany, but lots of folks have prejudice and don't like your people.”

“Then I guess you'll just have to sort them out, Chief. You know, our people, as you call them, pay taxes and they vote.”

“Not for me. I'm past that age and retiring next fall. That's why I can afford to say it the way it is. A man running for office can't afford that.”

The police chief was leaving when Mrs. Seligman, a stout, emotional woman in her late thirties, pushed past Mrs. Shapiro and declared, “I know what a terrible day this is for you, Rabbi, with what happened to the synagogue, but I must talk to you. It's life and death. Alone,” she said, glaring at Mrs. Shapiro.

David nodded. “You can go, Mrs. Shapiro.”

“I'm only trying to do my job,” Mrs. Shapiro said, returning to the refuge of tears. “Everyone wants to talk to you today.”

“Of course, and thank you.” He asked Mrs. Seligman to sit down. “What's the trouble, Mrs. Seligman?”

“The trouble is that my daughter is pregnant, and she's fifteen years old, God help her.”

“Yes, that's trouble.” He recalled her daughter, a luscious, lovely young woman, dark eyes and silken hair. “Do you know how it happened?”

“It happened with a football player in high school whose name is Freddy Bliss. Not Jewish. Anyway, how could a girl her age get married?”

“No, we don't want to destroy her that way. Does Bert know?” He hoped he recalled her husband's name correctly.

“I'm afraid to tell him. He goes into rages.”

“Suppose I come by tonight, and we'll tell him together. We can't make any decision about your daughter until he knows.”

His phone rang then.

“David,” Lucy said. “I heard what happened, and things must be a little crazy over there —”

“You could say that.”

“But Mom called. Pop had a heart attack. They've taken him to the hospital.”

“I'll be there in a few minutes,” David said, and then he explained the circumstances to Mrs. Seligman.

“Do you think I should tell Bert?” she wanted to know. “By myself. He'll go crazy, but I can tell him.”

“If I can't come by tonight, it will be some time in the next two days. Better wait.”

“I hope it's all right at your home. Today isn't a good day, Rabbi.”

It wasn't a very good day. By the time David got home, Lucy's father was dead.

“It's so damned unjust,” Lucy said. “He was only fifty-five. He was such a good, decent man. Why is the world so rotten unjust?”

A long, long time ago, when he was a student at the Institute before World War Two, David had complained to Rabbi Belsen about the unjustness of God.

“And what has God got to do with justice, David? Man, not God, invented justice.” So he had said, or something of that sort. It was long ago, and David's memory might well be failing him. It was said and taught that the God of Israel was a just God.

Della Klein came to take care of the kids. “Don't tell me anything,” she said to Lucy. “We'll all survive. Just go.”

Lucy sat next to David, crying quietly as they drove to New York. He had no easy words to say to her. He could imagine an Orthodox rabbi saying, “Your father will be among the blessed ones.” All the religions had words to say, and no one said simply that death was a rotten and terrifying thing that we understand as little as we understand everything else. For some reason, his thoughts were taken back to a road in Germany, and by the roadside there was lying the head of a young German soldier, just the head, with its blue eyes open and staring and its hair like corn silk. No body, only the head, and the American kids marching by it would see it and pretend not to see it, glance at it and then turn their eyes away. Why the thought at this moment? Why mourn, even in vague memory, one dead of a nation that had inflicted upon mankind a war that left fifty million dead? But his mind was not a single thing. It was split into past, present, and future. Where had he read that when the mind is a single thing, a person is given a state of grace?

Lucy touched his hand on the wheel. “David, David, is it the end? Will I ever see him again?”

“Darling, I don't know.” That was a lie. Her question had evoked the terrible finality of death, and it laid its icy fingers over his heart. Never, not when his mother passed away, not during the war, had he responded to death like this. It was not her father; David liked Herb Spendler. He was a good-natured, easygoing man whose years of composing the news in the Linotype room of the
New York Times
had bred in him an unaggressive cynicism. He had tried gallantly to conceal the contempt he felt for the rabbinate, the ministry, or any other aspect of religion, and his affection for David had been very real.

“You didn't know,” Lucy said, “but whenever we had a scrap, or when I felt I had come to the end of my own rope, I would call him. Now he's gone.”

“I'm here,” David said.

She pressed close to him, silent for the rest of the drive.

In New York, it was Lucy's mother pleading for him to unfold mysteries. David had never realized what a young and attractive woman Sally Spendler was, perhaps because one reserves a certain point of view for a mother-in-law. Now she clung to him and told him tearfully, “We don't even have a burial plot. We never belonged to a synagogue. What shall I do, David?”

“That's no problem,” David assured her. “We'll bring Herb up to the Ridge and bury him in our cemetery,” wondering meanwhile what it would be like with the frozen ground and the winter weather.

It was snowing again, lightly, when they laid Lucy's father to rest. The little circle of family and friends stood mutely in the snow, cold and shivering. Lucy and her mother wept. It was as if death had reached out and touched the whole world with its icy fingers.

But, as occurred to David, life denies death and asserts itself; and the life in question was growing in the uterus of the fifteen-year-old Seligman girl. Or
child,
as David noted, sitting facing Bert Seligman and his wife. Bert had already expressed his anger, stalking back and forth across the room, raging that he would kill “that rotten little slut,” demanding that he face her with her “crime” immediately. His wife wept, and David allowed the man's anger to use itself up.

“Would you send her away?” David wondered.

“Send her away? Rabbi,” Bert Seligman said, “she's a slut, but she's my kid. I don't send my kids away.”

“Then you must understand,” David insisted.

“What in hell's to understand?”

“That she needs love and it isn't there. If you'd stop tearing the kid to pieces and take her to your heart —”

“Who are you to tell me what to do?”

“I'm you're rabbi, and either you will damned well listen to me or I walk out of here right now.” He rose.

“No. Please,” Mrs. Seligman begged him.

“All right. But I will talk and you will listen. Is that agreed?”

They both nodded silently.

“All right. Now whoever the father may be, a child of that age should not be married or bear a child. So we won't discuss that. I want you to take her to Dr. Levine tomorrow.”

“And tell the whole world,” Mrs. Seligman wailed.

“We will tell no one, but we have to talk about your daughter and how to treat her and try to save her life. Don't you see how important that is?”

It was past midnight when he came home. Millie Carter was with Lucy. It was eight days since Herb Spendler's death, and still Lucy lived with a terror of being alone. David apologized. “The Seligmans are in bad trouble. I couldn't leave earlier.”

“You mean the kid and Freddy Bliss?” Lucy asked.

David sighed. “I pledged my word no one would know.”

“It's around,” Millie said. “This Bliss kid is a damned little monster, and your Seligman child is no angel. Will the family remain here?”

“I imagine so.”

Millie shook her head hopelessly. “I'm off now. It would be so nice to be without a congregation for a while, wouldn't it, David? I'm going to find us a tiny isle for R and R, populated entirely by Druids.”

About two weeks later, Martin Carter telephoned David and asked him to please come over to the church. The new Congregational church was about a mile and a half from the synagogue and David's home. It was on toward evening, the cold winter sun beginning to set.

“I can't imagine what he has in mind,” David told Lucy, “but I'll be back in time for supper.”

Martin's office, lit up now, was at the back of the church. His secretary had gone home. Martin opened the door, and inside David saw a man and two boys. The boys were about fourteen years old. The man, about forty, was heavily built, sloping shoulders, powerful arms and hands. He wore a sheepskin jacket and denim trousers. David learned later that he was a builder, living in Leighton Ridge and with his business in Danbury. His name, Martin informed David, was Thomas Hendley.

“Mr. Hendley,” Martin said, “is a member of our church. This,” indicating one of the boys, “is his son, Robert, and this young man's name,” indicating the other boy, “is Joe Menaro. They're here because Mr. Hendley brought them here. They're responsible for the damage done to the synagogue.”

“I'm prepared to pay the cost, and they're going to work it off or I'll take it out of their hides. I'll tell you this, Rabbi, and right to your face. I don't like you people any better than the next one, but we don't do things this way in America.” Hendley paused for breath. “We're not hoodlums or the Mafia.”

“How did you find out that the boys did it?” David asked.

“Robert told his mother.”

“Perhaps you could wait outside and let us talk to the boys,” David said.

Hendley stared at him suspiciously. Martin said, “It might help, Mr. Hendley. Just for a few minutes.”

“Whatever you do, they brought it on themselves. You going to call the police?”

“That's not what I had in mind.”

“What the police do,” said Hendley, “that's legal.”

“I'm a minister,” Martin said, “and he's a rabbi. We don't beat children.”

“All right — and remember, I can't stay here all night. I'm willing to pay all the damages.”

The door closed behind him. Martin pushed a couple of chairs toward the boys. “Sit down.”

“We're not calling the police,” David said. “Mr. Hendley will pay the costs, and you can settle with him. But nobody gets a free ride, and the price of being able to walk out of here without a police record is to answer some questions I'll put to you.”

For the first time since he had come into the room, the two boys raised their heads to look directly at David.

“What questions, mister?”

“Call him Rabbi Hartman when you address him,” Martin said.

“Question one: Why did you do it?”

Hendley remained silent. Menaro shrugged and shook his head. “I don't know.”

“How many Jews do you know?”

“Some kids in school.”

“Do you like them or hate them?”

“They're okay,” Menaro said.

Hendley nodded.

“Do you know what a swastika is?”

No response.

“You painted them over the front of the synagogue and on the scroll. Do you know what the scroll was?”

No response. They just sat, silent, and stared at him.

“That scroll we call the Torah — a Hebrew word for Law. In it, hand-lettered, are the first five books of the Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy. It's the Jewish Bible, the Protestant Bible, and the Catholic Bible — all the same. Would you have defaced it if you had known that?”

Still, they were silent.

“It won't do,” David said softly. “You answer my questions, or I call in the cops. Now, would you have defaced that scroll if you knew it was a Bible?”

“No,” they muttered.

“All right. Let's go back to the swastikas, the hooked cross you painted on the front of the synagogue. What is the swastika?”

“It's Nazi,” Hendley said.

“What about you, Menaro? Did you know that?”

“Yeah.”

“And I'm sure that both of you know that the Nazis hated the Jews. They murdered six million Jews. In one day, over eight thousand Jewish women and children were put to death, gassed. But the Nazis, the people whose symbol you painted on our house of worship, didn't stop with the Jews. They murdered over three hundred thousand Gypsies. They executed thousands of Italians and French and every other nationality in Europe. In fact, not since God created the world has any group been responsible for as much suffering and for as many deaths as this same Nazi Party of Germany. I want you to know this so that the next time you use a symbol, you will try to understand it. Now you can go.”

After the boys had left, Martin and David sat in silence for a minute or so. Then Martin said, “I think you were right. I wouldn't have thought of it that way.”

David rose. “Lucy's still holding dinner.”

“No time for a drink? One drink?”

“It's no good when I feel this way.”

“How's that?”

“Filled with despair.”

•

PART FIVE

1956

•

I
n 1956, spring came to Leighton Ridge like a gentle benediction, indeed like a promise of peace and good will. The world was without war — that is, without a major war — and the President of the United States had turned out to be an amiable old gentleman who did not enjoy rocking the boat. Even Senator McCarthy had been brought to bay and silenced, and in a tiny village in an unimportant corner of Connecticut, Lucy Hartman had invited a few people to dinner. The children had been fed and put to bed, where they would by no means sleep immediately, but whisper to each other and sneak down the hall to the staircase and try to pick up the conversation downstairs. Mrs. Holtzman, a stout, middle-aged lady who was the only survivor of a German-Jewish family that had perished in the concentration camps, was there, helping with the cooking and serving, and the dining room table had been extended to its greatest length to accommodate eight people.