The Outsider (21 page)

Aside from the Hartmans, the dinner guests were Mel Klein, the president of the synagogue; his wife, Della; Eddie Frome and his wife, Sophie; and Millie and Martin Carter. They were the best friends that David and Lucy had made since coming to Leighton Ridge. Mel Klein at sixty-one was a father figure of sorts; Della, twenty years younger, was Lucy's rock and consolation. When she wept, when she had to be a little girl, when she hated Leighton Ridge so bitterly that she was ready to pack a suitcase and walk out, it was Della's bosom that received her, and Della's gentle praise of David that made Lucy look at David newly. Indeed, sometimes Lucy felt that Della was in love with David. Yet this was never a threat. As for Eddie Frome, not only did he bring them his world of
The New Yorker,
one of the very few places where wit and common sense and sanity still survived, but he himself was a source of amiable intelligence. The fact that he had the reputation of consoling certain lonely and unhappy women in the neighborhood did not press David toward judgment. His wife, Sophie, accepted it. She was a very slender, delicate woman who adored their single child, a boy of ten named Philip, and who adored her husband. She said little at any gathering, but she was sweet and sufficiently doll-like to be accepted with her silence. And Martin and Millie Carter were relaxed in the one place they felt they could say anything they pleased and not be rebuked by one or another section of their parishioners.

“We talk from premises,” Ed Frome said, after there had been a round of tributes to the spring weather. “If no premises are shared, no conversation is possible.”

“But arguments.”

“Not conversation. Something else.”

“No brotherhood is possible,” Martin Carter said.

“I think arguments are conversation,” Lucy said.

“Brotherhood is your
shtick,
Martin,” Frome said. “I'm a simple semanticist, and I take my hat off to bad weather as well as good weather. You see, we share. Everyone loves a cool, sunny day. Everyone is depressed when it rains. Everyone is cold, everyone is hot. Marvelous shared premises.”

“I'll be the silly one,” Della said. “Why no conversation without a shared premise?”

“Conversation. You know, the word once meant a way of life, a style of living. But not today — today, Della, it's a relaxed exchange of thoughts. Well, suppose I say to you that the Soviet Union is a good place to live. You believe it's a very bad place to live. We share no premise. That makes conversation difficult.”

“It makes jokes more difficult — what you call your premise,” Mel Klein said. “In my shop yesterday, two Puerto Rican workers are having a bitter argument. They try to pull me into it. I say, ‘Hold on. I'll tell you a story. This fellow's walking down the street and he comes across two men having a bitter argument. He listens to this one, he listens to that one, he listens to this one, he listens to that one — and then he shakes his head, says, “Don't make me crazy,” and walks away.' Would you believe these two fellows in my shop, they don't know what I'm talking about?”

“No wonder,” Della said. “I don't know what you're talking about, and I'm Jewish.” She turned to Millie Carter. “Do you get that joke, Millie?”

“I'm afraid not.”

Mrs. Holtzman came in with an apple tart. There was much praise for the tart, which Lucy had created. There was talk about Sanka, real coffee, and tea. Lucy cut the tart and sent the plates around the table. More praise for the tart after they tasted it.

“Still and all,” David said, “that question of the premise which Eddie talks about is very important, and I know just what you mean, Mel. Without a shared premise, you can't tell a joke. I was in a little stone farmhouse in France with half a dozen G.I.s, and we were under heavy fire, and in a moment of silence, one of the kids said to me, you know, kind of bragging, ‘What the hell, Rabbi, everyone has to die some time.' I said to him, ‘I know, I know, but I want to die in a very special way. I want to die in a corner room at Mount Sinai Hospital at the age of ninety-seven, all my relatives gathered around, a bowl of fruit on one side of my bed, a jar of nuts on the other.' Well, by now all the kids were listening. No one laughed. Finally, one of them said, ‘Rabbi, what would you want with that jar of nuts, you in there dying?'”

The men around the table burst into laughter. Millie looked at Lucy, “Is it that I'm not Jewish, or do I totally lack a sense of humor, or is it that premise of Eddie's?”

“None. What David told those kids in the farmhouse is an old Jewish vaudeville cliché. In a Jewish hospital, or I suppose in any hospital, corner rooms are the most expensive. Dying in a corner room shows status. Having the family around shows status in the family. And when I was a little girl and we visited someone in the hospital, we brought nuts, fruit, and flowers. And I suppose, David, the kids were from Tennessee or Iowa or some such place?”

“No doubt, no doubt, but you put your finger on so much of it — the shared premise, I mean. Our society would fall apart without it.”

“This is delicious,” Martin said, taking the last bite of his tart. “David's right. Every social function partakes of a shared premise. Christians share the belief that Jesus was the divine Son of God. But the belief rests on a shared premise. Jews don't share the premise, which makes it almost impossible to convince them.”

“And what is our premise, David?” Frome asked.

“That God is one.
Adonoy Echod.
”

“But there's a prior one, isn't there?” Frome persisted.

“Prior?” Martin asked.

David felt a cold chill touch his heart.

“Definitely. Prior.”

“God,” David said softly.

“Exactly.”

Mel Klein, increasingly uneasy, changed the subject. “Did you all read about Jack Osner today? I know David gets the
New York Times.
”

“Haven't looked at it today.”

“I've been avoiding mine,” Martin said.

“I read ours,” Lucy said. “I'm not impressed.”

“What is she not impressed with?” Frome asked.

“The fact that Jack's been made Deputy Secretary of De fense,” Mel informed them. “He'll be sitting in on Cabinet meetings.”

“I don't see him there. Defense? He spent the war at a desk in Washington.”

“It makes sense,” Frome said. “He's very close to the gentlemen in the Pentagon. I have no love for Osner, but I had to do a story on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I had some real trouble getting to them until I mentioned it to Osner. He waved his wand, and I saw them the following day.”

“Jack does things that way,” Mel said. “He's a smart man.”

“He's a pig,” Della said.

“Makes him fit for government,” Ed Frome commented.

“Oh, come on,” Mel scolded. “That's no way to talk about him. It's unfair.”

“Ask Shelly Osner how unfair. He beat the living daylights out of her.”

“Oh, no,” Martin said. “We haven't seen Shelly lately, but we used to be close. I can't imagine.”

“His kids won't see him,” Della persisted. “They're both away; the girl at college —”

“Hold on, please,” David said. “The Osners still belong to this congregation. They're not selling their house, and they'll be spending summers here. As for Jack, we'll wait and see.”

“Speaking of premises,” Lucy said, “a prevalent one holds that apple pie was created by Martha Washington on an off day when she was not inventing ice cream. You know, as American as apple pie. Now this tart you are all praising so wisely is definitely European, and it might of course be argued this isn't an apple pie. Although I think it is. However, apple pie is eaten in a good many countries. So much for the premise.”

“Nobody argues the truth of premises,” Martin said. “Only the usefulness.”

“Like our being the result of the premise that good is poor. We all want our minister to be good, therefore keep him on the edge of starvation.”

“Millie, we're not on the edge of starvation.”

“Because Grandpa left me a trust fund. Not because of a minister's wages.”

“Hear! Hear!” Lucy said.

“We're not starving,” David reminded her.

“Still, it's no path to riches,” Martin said. “Yet in a way I find it comforting to accept the fact that I'll never be rich, regardless of what happens and in spite of the trust fund.”

“Episcopal ministers do better,” Millie said.

“Not in this town. But what about your side of the street, David? You have three sects, so to speak, don't you?”

“Not exactly sects or even divisions. Let's say interpretations. The Orthodox Jew is for the most part a fundamentalist, accepting a literal interpretation of the Bible and living his life, to one degree or another, by a code of Jewish law called the
Shulchan Aruch.
The Conservative group accepts a great deal of Orthodox Judaism, but tempers it to modern life. For instance, many a Conservative Jew will eat ham in a restaurant but not at home. Others are indifferent in religious terms, but unwilling to take the step to Reform Judaism.”

“How big is the step?”

“Not very big, but qualitative. We try to do away with superstition and mumbo-jumbo and find an ethical response in religion. We try to go back to the simple worship that prevailed long, long ago, before the stultifying superstition of the Middle Ages and the Pale of Settlement in the czar's Russia.”

“The Pale being,” Frome explained, “an area where Jews were allowed to live, there and nowhere else.”

“To me,” Mel Klein said suddenly, yet tentatively, “it's the rejection of Orthodox Judaism. I think orthodoxy anywhere is a terrible thing.”

“All orthodoxy?” Millie wondered.

“All of it. My mother died when I was eight years old,” Klein said. “My people were immigrants, and like most immigrants they were Orthodox, and every day I had to go to an Orthodox synagogue to say the prayer for the dead. There would be fifteen or twenty old men at the morning service, and they teased me and tortured me with little stupid tricks, like giving me a glass of vodka and telling me it was water. I don't know whether it was malevolent, but even at that young age, I realized that their devotion to prayer was apart from any sensitivity to the feelings of a kid who'd just lost his mother. After that time, I never set foot in an Orthodox synagogue again. I don't pretend to judge Orthodox Jews on my experience as a kid in that one place, but after that, I began to watch every kind of orthodoxy. None of them are good — in my opinion. I don't ask anyone to agree with me.”

“Yet it could give you strength and courage at a time when you might need it.”

“Orthodoxy or faith?” Martin wondered. “The two are not the same thing.”

“But your forebears, Martin,” Ed Frome said, “the worthy Pilgrim fathers, were the most orthodox of the orthodox. They may have been a cold and bleak parcel of folk, but they cut their homes out of this wilderness and they survived and they really put their stamp on this place.”

“True, and I can't help thinking of the Orthodox Jews who went to their death in the Holocaust with such courage and faith.”

“Your own vision, Martin,” Ed Frome said. “I'll be damned if I'd vouch for or even try to approximate the feelings of the people who were slaughtered by Hitler. And I'm not defending orthodoxy, and I'm not even sure that I don't dislike your Pilgrim fathers intensely. They're definitely not my crowd. But I will say this — that the handful of Jews who fought the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto for over forty days — they were not Orthodox.”

“I suppose Catholics are the most orthodox of all,” Millie said.

“I did a hitch in Salt Lake City for the U.S.O.,” Lucy said. “You can't even spell orthodoxy until you've been around the Mormons.”

“Or a Southern Baptist,” Martin said. “They're all very sure that they have God's word and purpose down letter-perfect. All the orthodox share that conviction, and in the name of this crazy, malignant, bloodthirsty God, whether Episcopal, Lutheran, or Catholic or Muslim — whatever religion you choose — they will kill and slaughter by the millions.”

“Good heavens,” Della said, “is that the kind of sermon you preach?”

“That's the kind of sermon he thinks,” Millie said. “It isn't easy to be a minister and know what hell religion has produced.”

“Into the living room, please, for our coffee,” Lucy told them. “This conversation is getting dangerous.”

Mrs. Holtzman lived with her daughter and her son-in-law in Danbury. Usually, her daughter picked her up, but tonight both of them were in New York at theater. Lucy suggested that they make up a bed on their couch, but David said, no, he'd drive her home. When Lucy protested that it was over an hour's drive round trip, David told her that he could use the time to clear his head.

For the first few minutes, sitting beside David in the car, Mrs. Holtzman remained silent. Then she said, uncertainly, “Would it be all right for me to ask you a question, Rabbi?”

“Of course.”

But like most people who at last find their important point of reference, Mrs. Holtzman's question was preceded by a lengthy explanation. She herself was the daughter of a lower-middle-class Jewish family in Frankfurt. They had owned a notions shop and also sold some specialized fabrics, cheesecloth and netting and stiffening and inexpensive lace. It was a small business that provided no luxuries. They were a deeply religious family. “We suffered,” Mrs. Holtzman said, counting on her fingers, “Mama, Papa, my brother Hans, my sister Esther — all of them dead, murdered by the Nazis. I survived Dachau. Why? I don't know why, Rabbi. God decided. I must not question God's decisions. At night I pray. God of my fathers, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, I mourn the dead and I do not understand your favoring me, but I thank you. But my son-in-law, he has a different point of view. He won't set foot in a synagogue. His son will not be a
Bar Mitzvah.
I can't repeat the words he says about God, the names he calls him, and he says it doesn't matter, because he says there is no God. He says that even a stupid, sick God would not create such creatures as Hitler and Stalin. So I have to ask you, Rabbi, and I don't like to because it shows how weak my faith is, but still I must ask you.”