The Outsider (29 page)

“Lucy, don't do that.”

“What amazes me is that with all your preaching about insight, you have so little of your own. Why don't you admit how you feel about Della?”

“Because I don't feel that way.”

“Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Why do I do it? Wipe it out, please. Tell me about Osner.”

Happy to change the subject, he told her all that Osner had offered.

“Wow,” Lucy said softly, “that is a biggie, isn't it? Chief of the whole works, the whole, entire United States Army.”

“It's not that big — chief chaplain in charge of Jewish chaplains, and this army is not precisely loaded with Jewish soldiers. We're not back in ‘forty-two, when we had half a million Jewish soldiers in the army.”

“Why just a colonel?”

“That's all it calls for.”

“And, of course, you refused it.”

“I had to.”

“Why?” Lucy demanded.

“You know why. You know how I feel about war.”

“You didn't feel that way in nineteen forty-two. You weren't drafted. You enlisted, and when they made you a senior officer, you didn't protest it.” He tried to interrupt, but she pushed on, “Just let me say it, David, once and for all. You may be a pure one hundred percent pacifist and you may hate war, but if it weren't for you and millions of other kids in U.S. uniform, we might both be living under Hitler today, only we wouldn't be living, we'd be dead. Tell me I'm wrong!”

“I don't know whether you're wrong, Lucy, and that's not the point here.”

“What is the point? I know what a miserable shithead Jack Osner is, but he didn't have to do this. He held out a hand to you and you spit in it.”

“No, he didn't,” David said softly. “He has to make points with the Pentagon wherever he can. I hate to say this, but for him to hand the Joint Chiefs of Staff a war hero with all the damned decorations they gave me, no less a Jew and a rabbi — that's bonanza time for him. He's Jewish, and don't think they don't know it, and if Nixon wins the election, Osner will be Secretary of Defense.”

“David, I'm a rabbi's wife in a congregation that pays you eight thousand dollars a year and a house to live in. This is nineteen sixty. You have been rabbi in Leighton Ridge for fourteen years. You are almost forty-four years old, and what do we have to show for it? I make my own clothes. I save pennies to have Mrs. Holtzman in to do dinner for a few guests, and we're the only family in the congregation who doesn't have a color television. Our car is falling apart — David, do you realize what Osner offered you? Have you ever been to Georgetown?”

“I've been there, yes.”

“It's the best neighborhood in Washington. If the army offers us a house in Georgetown, it doesn't come without servants. We both know the army. Not just a car, but a chauffeur-driven limousine. David, it's like a Cinderella story — and the freedom to travel anywhere without cost, all the places we've talked about and dreamed of seeing and never saw. We can send our kids to college — David, it doesn't mean you have to drop your principles by the wayside. Those kids in the service need you. They needed you during the war, you know that. Please — call Jack. Tell him you've changed your mind. He needs you as much as you need him.”

David shook his head. “I can't. Please don't go on with this, Lucy. You know that I can't.”

“No, you can't,” Lucy said. “If you could, it would put you in step with the rest of the human race and we can't have that, can we?”

“Lucy —”

“Oh, the hell with it, David. Let me go to sleep. I'm tired.”

Summer ended and fall came, but the gap between David and his wife was not closed or healed. After their talk that night, she never again referred to Jack Osner's offer. The election day of 1960 arrived, and Nixon was defeated and John Kennedy became President of the United States. But those in Washington who prided themselves in knowing what was going on, and who was making it go on, did not package Jack Osner together with Dick Nixon. It was noted that Kennedy shook hands with Osner in front of the cameras, and Kennedy said, “Jack, suppose you call me Jack.” So it went in the seats of the mighty, but then Osner had not run for office. His law firm was known in Washington as power brokers. Members of such firms are never counted out.

So Camelot came to the Potomac, and the torches that lit its golden glow were not unlike the torches that began to burn in Vietnam. It would be called Johnson's War and Nixon's War, and very few remembered that John Kennedy lit the first flames.

In Leighton Ridge, David's son, Aaron, faced his thirteenth birthday. David had never been very fond of the
Bar Mitzvah,
ushering a boy into so-called manhood, and he had been even less delighted with the Reform movement's decision to extend the process to girls. He felt that the potlatch, the tidal wave of food and drink with which the proud parents inundated friends and relatives, was vulgar and unnecessary, and he would just as soon have erased the whole medieval ceremony. Yet, strangely enough, facing the
Bar Mitzvah
of his only son, he was excited and proud, and he found himself looking forward to the day.

At thirteen, Aaron Hartman was a tall, large-boned youngster, already five feet ten inches in height. He played center on the Leighton High basketball team, even though he was still in the junior high, and he was on the high school swimming team, with a preference for the free-style hundred meter. All of this made him a local hero of sorts among his peers and a kind of idol to his sister, Sarah, who might one day be a lovely woman, but who was now possessed of the same build as her brother — long, large bones, skin so heavily freckled that the untouched skin went unnoticed, five feet seven inches tall, with hair bleached by the sun into a variety of shades. Her fine features, well-shaped head, and bright blue eyes reassured her parents, but Sarah considered herself the ugliest living creature in Leighton Ridge and took refuge in her brother's glory. As for Aaron, his long, ugly, bony face bothered him not at all.

As far as David was concerned, he regarded his son with a mixture of love and bewilderment. Aaron was at ease with the world. It was a fine physical world where you did your thing, where you poured sweat, drank great quantities of bottled junk, ate enormous amounts of food without gaining any fat, and gave no thought to anything beyond Leighton Ridge. Times were when David took him climbing on the gentle slopes of the Berkshires. The boy was interested in what he was doing and not much else, yet he was no fool, his school grades were excellent, and when David and Lucy had taken the children with them on a trip to Israel, paid for by the congregation, Aaron fell into Hebrew as if he had been born to it, often translating for his father, whose seminary Hebrew was hardly up to the occasion. Both of his children reminded David of the
kibbutz
children they saw in Israel — the lack of pensiveness, the fierce physical self-possession, the indifference to the intellectual's need to question things.

Yet facing his son now in the synagogue, completing the
Bar Mitzvah
ceremony with the blessing
Baruch she-petarani,
“Blessed is the Lord who has brought him to manhood,” David added softly, “Be wise, my son, because without wisdom, there is no goodness.”

After she kissed her son, Lucy kissed David, her eyes brimming with tears. She had made herself a yellow dress for the occasion, and she had done her hair in a new way, piling it on top of her head. Recognition came to David as if she were a stranger. She was a very comely woman indeed.

A few days after, alone with David, she said to him, “I don't know how I can live without you, but I must. You know that, don't you?”

He watched her without replying.

“Please don't try to stop me this time, David. Please don't.” And then she added, “I have to live, David.”

“Yes, you do,” he said.

•

PART SEVEN

1966

•

W
hen they picked up the last passenger at Norwalk, Father Joseph Kelly, a very fat Paulist priest, David began to chuckle. Martin Carter's old station wagon groaned and creaked with the added weight, and David apologized to Father Kelly. “Forgive me, Joe, I am not laughing at you. I was thinking of Jerome K. Jerome's book
Three Men in a Boat,
and that broke me up.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. I can't even remember it properly. I think it was Bert's umbrella.”

“It's going to rain,” Rabbi Bert Sager said. “Do you know what you people are? You are something out of a Sholem Aleichem story, or divine or maybe not so divine fools out of Chelm, where they bring out all their sieves to gather rain water for the future. I bring an umbrella because it looks and feels like rain, and this rabbi of what they call Reform Judaism, here sitting next to me, tells me it reminds him of Jerome K. Jerome. Not bad, David, not at all bad, when I come to think of it. Tonight, my wife says to me, Bert, will you please tell me where you are going? She is a plain, intelligent, suffering wife of a rabbi who has a congregation in Connecticut, nothing so fancy as David's here, but a simple Conservative congregation. So what should I tell her? Should I say to her, Sylvia, I am being picked up by two skinny Protestant ministers, a skinny rabbi, a plump Catholic priest — plump, Joe, it fits both of us? Never admit to being fat. Plumpness is a virtue that these desiccated Puritans cannot understand.”

“That's kind of you, Bert. I've always thought of myself as being substantial.”

“Nice, too. Substantial. So they pick me up, I tell my wife, and we drive to New York to Saint Patrick's Cathedral. Not inside — heaven forbid — but outside, where we have pledged ourselves to a four-hour vigil. That's why we are loaded with candles. We will sit down cross-legged on the street and light our candles. Of course, since I haven't been able to sit cross-legged since I was twelve, well, we'll work that out. Anyway, we sit there four hours. I tell this to my wife. So what would Sylvia say?”

“There'd be a lot of truth in what she would say,” David decided.

“I don't know,” Philip Simpson said. He was a Methodist minister from Westport. “It's absolutely true that if I were to go down there alone and light a candle and sit myself down in the middle of Fifth Avenue, the police would pick me up and cart me away to Bellevue. And I suppose they'd be right to do so.”

“They'd be wrong to do so,” David said.

“Perhaps, perhaps. But there'll be a hundred thousand people sitting there on Fifth Avenue with lighted candles, and the police have stopped the traffic and the Mayor has sort of given his blessing, and perhaps it will mean something, or change something.”

“Very little, I'm afraid,” Father Kelly said. “President Johnson is a hard man; unfortunately, a very stupid man, frozen in his lusts and his madness. Only the wise can be good. I picked that up from one of your sermons, Rabbi Hartman. I confess in all good faith that I steal from your sermons without conscience; but to go back to this man Johnson, there is no wisdom there. It's a small matter to him if a hundred thousand people sit on Fifth Avenue through the night burning their hands with hot wax. By the way, how many of you thought to bring a candlestick?” He twisted to look around the car. “Ah, the two rabbis. You Protestants have lost touch with the magic of candles.”

“Not at all,” Martin said. “Drip a bit of wax onto the street, plant your candle there, and let it burn. Why hold it in your hand?”

“Touché!”

“None of that,” Kelly said. “This is the most interesting ecumenical foray in history. This is a nineteen fifty-two station wagon we're riding in, isn't it, Martin?”

“Fifty-one.”

“So God's purpose becomes immediately explicit, since for this car to carry the five of us to New York is assuredly a miracle. Unlike Rabbi Sager, I have no wife to conceal my innocence or insanity from, but I do have my boss at the church, Father Flannigan, and I could hardly lie to him. The look he gave me was completely astonished. ‘Do you mean, Joseph,' he said to me, ‘that you are driving to New York with a Congregationalist minister and a Methodist minister and two rabbis, and you will all sit down on Fifth Avenue opposite Saint Patrick's Cathedral and hold lighted candles in your hands?' ‘That is exactly what I mean,' I told him, and then he says, ‘And why are you doing this strange thing?' And I say to him, ‘Why, to stop the war in Vietnam. Why else?'”

“He didn't forbid you?”

“Oh, no. No indeed. Of course, I can't say what he was thinking. He's a kind man.”

“He would have to be,” Rabbi Sager said.

“Of course you can miss the point,” David said. “It's in the nature of our culture to see the cleric as an object of ridicule. He is tolerated as a sort of idiot survival of the past in a time where nobody believes in God very deeply, if at all. Yes,” nodding at Kelly, “you Catholic priests are a little better regarded, because you work harder at your mythology, though it's not all wine and roses there either. But suddenly something has changed. For the first time in modern history, we're involved in the leadership of a great antiwar movement, and that is absolutely a fact. There are thousands of ministers, priests, and rabbis joined together to stop this obscene war in Vietnam. And we do not give God's blessing to our side. We cry out that it is wrong.”

“No doubt, no doubt,” Kelly agreed, “and if you can't see the hand of God in that —”

“Where was the hand of God in the First World War when the fields of France and Flanders ran with enough blood to float a fleet and it was all blessed by our colleagues on both sides?” Simpson wondered.

“Let's not get into one of those God's will things,” Martin said. “What I'm doing is my will. My son, Joseph, is in Toronto, working as a carpenter and glad to get the work. When he evaded the draft and refused to go to Vietnam, Millie and I agreed with him that as a Christian he could not do otherwise. Suddenly, it had become very hard to be a Christian. As for Jews — well, it has always been hard to be a Jew. Rabbi Hartman's son is in prison as a conscientious objector.”