The Outsider (24 page)

“Why? She'll be so far from you and from the kids.”

“Yes, but at the same time California has a kind of mystical significance for her. That's where she and Pop went on their honeymoon. They stayed in a little inn at Santa Barbara. That was right after Pop was mustered out of the army in nineteen eighteen, and from what Mom says, at that time Southern California was as close to heaven as you could get. The family's still in Santa Barbara, where Uncle Bert has his harness shop. Well, not much harness anymore. It's mostly boots and saddles and stuff like that, and they need help, and they're ready to give Mom a job. So that part of it's not too bad.”

“And the bad part?”

“I'll miss her so much, David.”

“We'll just have to tighten up on everything and put away enough money for a couple of trips a year.”

Lucy burst out laughing. “David, you're wonderful. Tighten up? Do you know how tight it is already?”

“We get along, don't we?”

“Barely. If it weren't for Dr. Levine and his free medicine and Della Klein's garden and the sewing machine the sisterhood gave me — well, we'd never make it. And two plane trips to California? I don't know how.”

“We'll find a way.”

David mentioned it to Martin, who said, “Well, there you are, David. We commit ourselves to a profession that pays nowhere as well as plumbing or carpentry. Fortunately, Millie has the little trust fund that throws off a few thousand a year, but my own feeling is that they should limit pastoring to the children of the very rich.”

“You're not serious?”

“No, of course not. But the trouble is that the Pilgrim fathers, who were as poor as church mice, turned poverty into a sin and created a national ideology to perpetuate the notion. If you're rich, God has blessed hard work and intelligence. If you're poor, it's because you're lazy, Godless, and stupid.”

“Leaves us out,” David noted.

“Leaves out the prophets, the apostles, Saint Francis, and any number of others.”

A few weeks later, at the beginning of June, David preached his last sermon of the spring season. For the next four weeks, the sermons would be preached by outside speakers invited for the evening. For his subject, David selected the ancient Jewish legend of the
Lamed Vov.
It was years since he had spoken of the
Lamed Vov,
and he had never been too eager to dwell on the subject, since it was at best a sad and lonely notion. David reminded the congregation that according to the old legend, if there came a point in history when thirty-six men of honesty, integrity, and saintly decency could not be found, the world would simply come to an end. “But,” David said in his sermon, “at a time when we are already stockpiling enough nuclear weapons to wipe out the entire human race, how shall we regard the legend
of Lamed Vov
? Is it quaint and pointless? Or is it that thirty-six just men can no longer exist in the kind of a world we have today?”

Afterward, Lucy said to him, “How could you? There were kids listening to you. That was the most depressing thing I ever heard.”

He accepted Lucy's criticism silently, avoided people as much as possible, and when the weekend was over, he drove to New York, telling Lucy that he would be back before dinner. His manner was such that Lucy did not ask for reasons or what business he might have in New York, but simply accepted with relief his absence for a day.

Rabbi Belsen, emeritus now, eighty-three years old, still occupied the same small office at the Institute. No one dared suggest that he retire or leave the office, because, as someone put it, no one cared to face the task of moving his books and papers. His books and papers filled the shelves, floor to ceiling, shelves built over every inch of wall space.

“You're early,” he said as David came into his office. He was making tea on his little electric plate. “Is it too hot for tea?” he asked. His beard was pure white, his eyes encased in more wrinkles, but otherwise little changed from the last time David had seen him, years ago.

“How are you?” David asked him.

“How long since you have been here, David, six years, eight years? I'm old. God saw fit to give me eighty-three years, but not to attend to other things like my eyes, my arthritis, my memory, not to mention my heart. Well, so what have I learned? Browning was a good poet, but a little foolish. ‘Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made.' Rabbi Ben Ezra, God bless him, maybe for him growing old was a pleasure. I don't enjoy it. You want sugar in your tea?”

“No, thank you.”

“Don't think I'm heartless or senile, rattling on like this. I'm trying to put you at your ease. You're filled with pain.”

“How do you know?”

“The way you made the appointment. The way you look now. Lost weight. Circles under your eyes. No ease — no plain pleasure about you, David.”

“My whole world has gone to pieces, Rabbi Belsen.”

“Worlds go to pieces. It's an old habit.”

David sought for words for what he had to say. “A failed priest” had a ring of history, tradition, but a “failed rabbi” was very flat indeed. He sat facing Rabbi Belsen, who waited patiently, gently stirring his tea, and then David blurted out, “I've lost my faith.”

“Oh?” The old man shook his head. “What you lost is unclear to me, David. Faith is a very Christian thing. The dictionary, if I'm not mistaken, usually defines faith as a belief without proof. Did you have such a belief to lose, a belief without proof? If you did, tell me what kind of proof you would have required to turn your belief into a fact?”

“I'm not sure I know what you mean. I believed in God. Now I don't believe anymore. I'm a rabbi who does not believe in God.”

“You know, it's such a long time we've been in America,” the old man said. “A hundred and fourteen years since my father came here. Nothing of course to compare with the people who settled Leighton Ridge, but nevertheless long enough to become totally confused. David, I would watch the way the people who came more recently from Eastern Europe drank their tea, holding a cube of sugar in their teeth while they drank. I tried it once, but it was not very satisfactory.” He paused and shook a finger at David. “No, I'm not losing my wits. I'm still trying to put you at your ease. I ask myself why you lost your belief in God. Is it because the world shows no indications of sanity anywhere? Or is it because people do terrible things? Both are underlined simply by reading the Bible, which will provide you with chapter and verse of acts of terrible horror consummated without atomic weapons or gunpowder.”

“I don't know why I stopped believing. I only know that I don't believe anymore.”

“I suppose you know that we say a Jew doesn't stop believing, he simply becomes very angry with God.”

“I've heard that.”

“You see, David, I am not arguing with you or trying to convince you of anything. At a moment like this, argument on my part would be useless. It would merely serve to sharpen your wit and force you to work out good arguments to support your case. I prefer to leave you confused. After all, you've had excellent rabbinical training, which is, I think, as good as what the Jesuits are said to provide. You know, David, a very wise doctor once said to me that no one who studies the human liver could fail to believe in God. But that would be no solution, would it?”

Smiling, David shook his head. “I'm afraid not.”

“Good. You feel a little better. I can imagine the agony you felt.”

“It's not simply a question of my own belief. I have to give up the synagogue.”

“Why?”

“How can I talk about God and belief and hope when I have no belief and hope?”

“From all I've heard, you're a very good rabbi. That's important. Do you feel that if you go on, you'll turn into a worthless rabbi?”

“Maybe. I don't know.”

“If you resign, will they find a better replacement?”

“I don't know, Rabbi. I can't answer such a question.”

“And I can't tell you what to do, David. I can't find God for you, and I can't tell you anything that will convince you that God exists. This is something you must discover for yourself. But is it possible that you never actually believed in God — something you have never been willing to face — until now?”

“No, that's not possible,” David answered, almost fiercely.

“All right. But think about it.”

“And you'll replace me at the synagogue?”

“Well — not yet. I'm not actively involved any longer in the placement of rabbis, but I can talk to the people who are. But not so quickly. You must think about this. Examine yourself more deeply. And don't think it would be so easy to find the proper person for Leighton Ridge. So for the time being, please, David, go on with your work.”

David left the Institute annoyed with himself and with Rabbi Belsen in equal measure, annoyed with himself because he had come whimpering to the old man without a shred of pride or dignity, as he saw it, and annoyed with Belsen because Belsen had offered nothing, neither hope nor knowledge. Hands thrust into the pockets of the old seersucker suit he was wearing, head bent, indeed his whole long, bony figure bent, he drifted along the city streets, turning over in his mind what he would have done had Belsen told him that he was through and that he should turn over his pulpit to someone else. He would have to tell Lucy that he no longer had a job and that the house they lived in was no longer theirs. And then what? What else was he fit for? His whole training, his whole competence, was for being a rabbi. He knew of a good many rabbinically trained men who ended up in various universities, teaching Bible History or Hebrew, or the Religions of the Middle East, but none of these speculative futures held any great attraction for him, even assuming that he could ever be hired by a college.

He found himself walking along Riverside Drive, and he paused to lean on the stone wall and look out at the river. There was enough wind to make the water dance in the sunlight, and directly opposite him, a large yawl was making its way up the river, trimming its sails to catch the wind. There were two men and two women working the sails, scampering across the boat, dodging the boom as it swung around, all of them sunburned, young, alive with the exhilaration of the struggle with wind and sails. Watching them, David realized that he had never been on such a boat, indeed on any sailboat, and suddenly his life appeared gray and meaningless, dull, a dullness interrupted only by the years of World War Two, and looking back at those years, he could recall instantly, and not without pleasure, the excitement, the danger, and the horror.

“My God,” he said aloud, “is the only way to be alive, to participate in the worst slaughter man ever created?”

He drove back to Leighton Ridge, wondering why he had come to New York, and when he tried to explain to Lucy why he had gone, she said to him, “David, you don't have to explain anything to me. You're a grown man, and you have the right to go to New York or anywhere else without consulting me or explaining to me.”

“No, I haven't. You're my wife.”

“Yes, and I know what you intend to tell me. You're going to tell me that you went to New York to see Rabbi Belsen or someone else in that strange place and ask them to give back to you the God you lost somewhere down the line.”

He was hurt. She could hurt him more deeply and easily than anyone else, and she saw the hurt on his face.

“Oh, I'm sorry,” she cried.

“It's all right. That's what I was going to tell you.”

“But why, David? Why? Not me — this you do to yourself.”

“You know, I want to tell you why, Lucy. You're my wife and I love you, so I should be able to tell you why. But it's so hard to say.”

“Try me, David. We've been married over ten years. Isn't it time you were able to talk to me, or each of us to talk to each other?”

“It's not that I don't want to, talk to you about it — it's just so hard to put it into words. I guess since I was a high school kid, I just knew that I was put on earth for a certain kind of service. No, that doesn't say it. Let's say I put myself in God's hands, and then whatever happened, it was all right. No matter how terrible it was, it was all right — as the poet put it, God's in his heaven, all's right with the world. And then, all of a sudden, the hands were no longer there.”

“David, David darling, they were never there. There are no hands. There are just people — you, me, the kids, our friends — just people. We do everything that's awful and we do everything that's good.”

“No!”

“David, look around you. There's an old religion called golf, and a new religion, absolutely ecumenical, called tennis, and the new apostles are the tennis pros. And God? David, he's out to lunch. David, look at what you're in. If you must have a God and if there is no God, what do you do?”

“I don't know,” he said hopelessly.

“You and Martin — you've painted yourselves into a corner.”

Two months after this incident, about ten days before the children were due to return to school, David and Lucy were finishing a late supper. The children were asleep, and Lucy suggested that they take their coffee into the living room. “I have something very important to discuss with you, David.” She had arranged for Mrs. Holtzman to be there — for reasons David couldn't understand, since there were only the two of them at the table — but she wanted to talk out of Mrs. Holtzman's earshot.

David sensed the chill of what was coming, if not the substance. For weeks now, the cord binding him to his wife had been stretched thinner and thinner. Their lovemaking had come almost to a standstill; their talk was more formal; the silences longer and longer. Tonight, Lucy said, “We must talk, David. We must talk about things you usually don't want to talk about, namely, you and me.”