The Outsider (30 page)

The others were quiet then. David wondered whether they were praying.

There were not a hundred thousand people with candles burning, seated in the street opposite St. Patrick's, but there were certainly half that number, and among them David sat and wondered, as he always wondered on such occasions, what possible good could come of his action. Lucy used to ask him that.

“It doesn't matter. You do it,” he would say.

Why? Why? Lucy's mind was filled with
whys,
as applied to David's view of the world. As far as Lucy was concerned, it was the way it was and always had been and nothing would ever change it. People got what they deserved, not via faith or prayer or God, but through the more effective agency of sheer, unmitigated stupidity and greed.

“You see,” Father Kelly said to Rabbi Sager, “it did not rain. God looks after the small things as well as the large.”

“If you think about it,” Rabbi Sager said, “you will recall that it never rains on Yom Kippur but very often on Saint Patrick's Day.”

“I don't believe this,” Martin said. “I just don't believe what I hear out of the mouths of two grown men.”

Of course, David was thinking, it was Lucy's intelligence, her sharp, incisive intelligence, that brought matters to a close. If she had been a foolish woman or a thoughtlessly pious woman, their marriage might have dragged on for a lifetime; but it was precisely because she could see no sense in what he did, no meaning or point or destination, that the marriage came to an end. That was basic; the amenities missing from her life were merely a necessary argument to herself.

Over five long years since she left him a second time and divorced him. It seemed incredible that so much time could have passed; empty time. And what did he face now? More and more emptiness.

“There's the rub,” Rabbi Sager said. “Nobody wants to believe in a divine handle in the weather. Not anymore. Even myself.”

It was a very simple and, as they say, civilized procedure. Lucy had taken the children with her to California, and leaving them there with her mother, she had spent enough time in Reno to have an uncontested divorce.

This time, David's world collapsed. He had heard it said that people who become sodden drunk may have little or no memory of what they do during the time, but his own memory of what happened was as clear as glass and as cold as ice. He was not a teetotaler. He would have a drink when the occasion warranted a drink, or two drinks or three, and during the war he had now and again become beer-drunk in the sad and lonesome way that kids do in a war. But this time, when a letter from Lucy informed him that the divorce was complete, that their small bank account was his, that he could visit his children when he pleased and work out any longer periods of visitation that he desired, that she would never fight him on any issue and that she would never turn the kids against him and that she still loved him and probably always would, he found his own existence to be more than he could bear. He took out a full quart bottle of Scotch whiskey, an unopened gift this Christmas past from Martin Carter, and he sat down with the whiskey and with a glass and proceeded to attempt to drink himself into insensibility.

Instead, with two thirds of the bottle in his stomach at two o'clock in the morning, he became very, very drunk. In that condition, he staggered out into the snow, the bottle in his hand, and made his way over the mile and a half of road that separated his house from the Carter house, pausing every now and then for another swallow of the whiskey. Considering what was in his stomach, his feat was a testimony to his physical make-up and his endurance. The snow was at least eight inches deep and still falling in fat, lazy flakes.

Under Martin and Millie's bedroom window, he stopped and shouted, “Carter, you holy God merchant!”

There was no response. The white clapboard house and the white clapboard church stood alone in an expanse of snow-covered fields, defined in the moonlight by the dark blue shadows of the stone walls that divided them, walls raised there long, long ago by tight-lipped Connecticut farmers, specifying where their sheep would graze and where their wheat would grow. And now a drunken rabbi shouted into the cold wind, “Martin Carter, you and I have been — you and I — we, we have been accused of eschewing the life of language, which is what Lucy said! Lucy was my wife! She said I eschew the living language and she left me and took away my children! If I could only say she ripped me off with all her motherfucking smarts, she would not have left me alone in that shitpile we call our house! But I can't say anything that means a damned thing anymore, and she knows it!”

At that point, the door opened, and Martin, in a bathrobe, his feet in a flapping pair of galoshes, came out into the snow and took David by the arm.

“Come on inside, old friend,” Martin said.

“No.”

“You're wet and cold and all you're wearing is a shirt, and if you don't come inside, you'll be sick.”

“Good. I'll die. It's about time.”

“You won't die. You'll just be very sick, and your friends, who all have better things to do, will have to take care of you.”

“They don't have to. Who's asking them to?”

He took the bottle from David's hand. “Did you drink all this?”

“You bet your ass I did.”

“Was it full?”

“You bet your ass it was.”

“You wouldn't want me to get sick, David?”

“Oh, no. No way. You're my friend, Martin. Of course, you could be some motherfucken S.S. man, trying to come off like some kind of Jew-loving priest —”

“David, stop that! You're drunk and you don't know what in hell you're talking about, and now you're coming inside with me.” There was a swallow of whiskey left in the bottle, and as David tilted it up, Martin grabbed it and flung it into the snow.

“That's enough!”

“You're shouting at me,” David whimpered.

“You are damned right I am!”

“I want to talk to Millie. Millie doesn't hate me.”

Martin guided David into the house, into the kitchen, where Millie had a large pot of coffee perking. The kitchen was cold. Millie had a robe over her nightgown. “How is he?” she asked Martin.

“He is as drunk as any drunk I ever saw. He apparently put away a quart of whiskey.”

“He could die from that.”

“He has the constitution of a horse. He's soaking wet. You start feeding him the coffee and I'll find a dry shirt and a sweater for him.”

A broken groan from David.

“Get him into the bathroom!” Millie cried.

Martin held him as David vomited into the toilet bowl. They were both lean men, but David was taller and heavier, and it was all Martin could do to keep him from collapsing onto the bowl. After he wiped him off with a wet towel, Martin somehow manipulated him back into the kitchen.

“Good and black?” he asked his wife.

“You bet.”

“Let's pour it into him.”

“I hear that with this kind of thing, you have to walk them too. The alcohol is, in effect, a poison.”

“That's right.”

They did both. They walked him and they poured black coffee into him, and by the time the first fingers of dawn touched the kitchen, Rabbi Hartman was sick, tired, red-eyed, and reasonably sober — sober enough to feel ashamed and miserable and guilty. “You always do it to those you love,” he mumbled. “I'm so sorry. And now I have to add insult to injury by asking for a ride home.”

“There's a foot of snow out there,” Millie said. “And anyway, you have to have something in your stomach, so I'll put up some eggs and toast. The children are all out of the house for years now, so it's nice to have someone infantile to take care of.”

“Millie!” Martin cried.

“She's absolutely right,” David said. “What a disaster I've turned into!”

“Nonsense. You've gone through a divorce, which is one of the most awful things a sensitive person can experience, and for you, with the burden you carry, it's worse than it is for most. But it's not the end of the world and it's not the end of your life.”

Millie put the eggs and toast in front of him. “Please eat this, David. I'm sorry for what I said.”

“You're perfectly right.”

“No, I'm not. Now please eat this. You've had a terrible night.”

So it had been, a terrible, sick night, over five years ago, yet the taste of that night was still with him. It would always be with him, and even his relationship with Martin would never be quite the same.

“You don't have to hold the candle in that little holder,” Martin whispered. “Put it on the pavement. I think Father Kelly is a bit of a nut.”

“Do you suppose we actually change anything?” David asked him. “Lucy never felt that we did. It was a bone of contention between us. When the cookbook she and Millie put together was published, I saw a whole window full of the book in Westport. She said that at least she and Millie changed the way people cooked — at least somewhat. What do we ever change?”

“That's a hard question to answer. In Vietnam, the Buddhist monks douse themselves with gasoline, sit down cross-legged, and set themselves on fire. I suspect the thinking is that the pain is so great, the horror so great, and the courage so great that it makes a plea for peace that must be heard.”

“But it isn't heard and nothing changes.”

“Can we be sure, David? I sit here with this silly candle, and then I think about the song, it is better to light just one little candle than to sit and curse the dark. Well, that's our only choice, isn't it?”

“Yes, our only choice.”

There had been a lot of talk in the congregation after David's divorce, and there had even been talk among some members of the congregation that he ought to resign; but nothing came of that. There was a minority group in the congregation who would have liked to rid themselves of Rabbi Hartman, but they were a minority and for the most part they kept their peace.Thebook of sermons, which was originally published in a German translation under the title
The Outsider,
had become a modest best seller in Germany; it was picked up in Holland and translated into Dutch and then into the Scandinavian languages. Its publication in England in the English language took place about a year after the German publication; and a year after that, David was approached by an American publisher. It was about this time that David received news of Herman Strauss's death. He changed the name of the American edition to
Two Silver Teaspoons
and wrote the story of his evening with Herman Strauss as a preface to the American edition. Although the book was not destined to be a runaway best seller, it was expected to do very well indeed, and, what with the foreign royalties and the American publisher's advance, his income was very substantial. For the first time in his life, David was freed from the niggling worries of poverty.

For this, he was most grateful, since Lucy had decided that the best place for the children to spend their summers was with their father at Leighton Ridge.

It had given him the sensation of meeting his children for the first time, and indeed the change in their appearance in the seven months since he had seen them brought two strangers to him. The boy had turned into a shy young man, but it was with Sarah that the actual miracle had taken place, the burst of puberty changing the ugly duckling into a lovely young woman. For the month of July, David had rented a cabin on the shore of Lake Cobbosseecontee in Maine.

It was a marvelous month. For the first few days, the children were stiff and protective of themselves, closed off; but after that, bit by bit, the three of them found each other. They had a canoe and an old skiff, and they had a shallow corner of the lake where the water was deliciously warm. There were islands scattered around the lake, and they found the best ones for picnicking. They built campfires in the evening, and they roasted corn and frankfurters.

But why had he never done it with Lucy?

And the questions were always the same, the same questions repeated to him when any couple in his congregation got divorced.

“Why did you and Mommy stop loving each other?”

“We never stopped.”

“Then why don't you live together?”

“Why can't we all live in Leighton Ridge?”

“What will become of us?”

Sarah was afraid of airplanes. “It will fall down, and we'll all be killed.”

They didn't like California. At summer's end, they sat with tear-stained faces, pleading not to be sent back.

A burst of wind in the Fifth Avenue canyon set the candles to sputtering. David's went out. Father Kelly leaned over and lit it for him.

“Why do we do what we do, Rabbi?” Kelly asked him. “Why do we sit here on Fifth Avenue, pleading with the men who rule the world to show a bit of compassion for people?”

“I suppose so that we can sleep at night.”

“Do the Johnsons and the Kissingers sleep?”

“I imagine they do,” David said.

“So what is left of your argument?” Father Kelly asked genially.

“What is left of all arguments, I suppose.”

“I would guess,” Rabbi Sager said, “that we sit here because we want so desperately to believe in God, and our silly pleading is that if we were to dispense with compassion and anger and prayer, then who would there be to bear witness to the fact that there ever was or could be a God? Possibly, that's what drove your Saint Francis. We want so much for God to notice us. I was in Jerusalem and I saw a terrorist's bomb explode in a crowd of women and children. I will never forget it, but we drop a very large bomb in Vietnam every minute of every hour of every day.”

“The thing is,” said Philip Simpson, the Methodist minister, “that there are people in my congregation, good, decent people who love their children and who read books and are literate and tithe properly, who never give a second thought to the things we're talking about, and who support the government totally.”