The Outsider (31 page)

“Did we — twenty, forty, fifty years ago?” Martin wondered. “When Mark Twain raged about the hypocrisy and evil of the war in Cuba, was there one pulpit in the land that supported him? And when the conscientious objectors went to prison in nineteen eighteen, the pulpits were as silent as the night, and where were the voices from the pulpits when the six million Jews were being put to death in Hitler's abattoirs? So if we serve God, we do it poorly — poorly.”

“There has to be a beginning,” Father Kelly said gently. “Perhaps this is the beginning.”

No one spoke now, and they sat in silence for another half-hour.

A uniformed policeman made his way among them, looking at them curiously, and in the distance a woman's voice, clear as a bell, singing the old Irish song “I laid my boy away today, with a bullet in his chest.”

The network people were threading back and forth with their hand-held cameras, and the sound of a woman's rich voice came, speaking for the television microphone, “We do what has to be done. It would be better done in Washington, but nothing is done there, so we try.” David craned his head to see her. She was a tall, lean woman, with light close-cropped hair, and as things do, she reminded him suddenly and poignantly of Sarah Comstock. The flash of memory created an almost overwhelming ache and desire for a woman, to be in love with a woman, to look at her with delight, to be in bed with her, to hold her in his arms.

It had happened to him once, the third summer he took his children to the lake in Maine, and she was working as a waitress in a hotel around a bend of the lake. She was very young, a senior at Smith College, a compact, delightful girl with brown eyes, short black hair, and a skin burned berry brown by the sun. She was not pretty, but healthy-looking and open-faced. She looked very much like Lucy when David met Lucy, and her name was Patience Street. She met him and his children in a canoe, her canoe floating alongside his, and since she worked only the dinner shift, she had time to spend with them. They went fishing and picnicking and swimming together, and she fell in love with Sarah and Aaron, and very likely with David too. There was one night when the children were asleep, and the black-haired girl, her eyes shining, went to bed with David, and after they had made love, whispered in his ear, “Marry me, David, and I will love you all my life.”

“And I think I could love you all my life,” he whispered back, “but I am forty-six years old and you are twenty-one years old, and I am a tired and tortured old Jew, and you are the essence of life and youth and joy and excitement and anticipation, and my anticipation is gone.”

“And you are absolutely crazy,” she said. “You are strong and vigorous and you make love better than any stupid boy pawing over me, and I love your kids and I think you're the most wonderful man I ever met, and we're so good in bed together — aren't we? Tell me truthfully, aren't we?”

But in the cold light of day, Patience Street's insistence that they be married faded, and when he embraced her before leaving the lake, David knew he would never see her again.

He spoke about her to Della Klein, simply because he had to speak about her to someone, but Della offered him small comfort. “You always run from it, don't you, David?” she said. “You run from life and you're guilty when you have a little joy.”

He had dinner at Della's house a few days after the candlelight protest, which had ended in a downpour of rain. “It's the kind of thing that I want to do,” Della said, “but I can't. I suppose I'm afraid. I always wonder whether it does any good at all. But that probably is a sop to my conscience.”

“Which is what we all wonder — does it do any good?”

“And did you stay there while it rained?”

“For a while. But then, instead of persistence being admirable, a point comes where it turns ridiculous.”

“Yes —”

“A feeling I am well acquainted with.”

“You are never ridiculous, David.”

“That is kind of you.” They were dining together, just the two of them, at Della's house. She had kept the big house after Mel died, mostly, as she put it, out of lethargy, but mainly because the old, rambling Connecticut farmhouse was a place she knew and loved and felt secure in. She was still a handsome woman who had retained her figure and her sense of humor. Her son had turned Mel Klein's small garment business into a national institution, but Della had no desire to become a part of it. She tended her garden, read books, and worked at the synagogue.

“Very kind of you,” David said, “but I often feel ridiculous. I have spoken to Martin about it, and he recognizes the feeling — the feeling of someone who steps into a totally impossible position. Think of it, to have the effrontery to believe that you can speak in God's name.”

“I never thought of it quite that way,” Della admitted. They had finished dinner. “It's turned cold,” she said, “and I have a fire in the living room. Can we sit in front of the fire, David? I'll do my best to seduce you without making you feel ridiculous.”

“It would take no effort. Do you know that once, in a fit of annoyance, Lucy accused me of being in love with you.”

“Without any truth in the accusation?”

“Some truth. You're a seductive and delicious woman. It's no sin to be in love with you.”

In the living room, they sat on the couch facing the fire, and Della poured coffee and said to him, “David, why in God's name must you indulge that sin thing? There is only one sin — to hurt another human being. All the rest is utter hogwash. I am no kid, but I am a woman who is still a woman, and I haven't felt a man's touch since Mel died.”

Suddenly she broke into tears. David took her in his arms.

“Oh, this is stupid,” she said. “Stupid.” He touched her face, and then he kissed her, and her passion was like an explosion. Then she stopped suddenly and said, “My God, David, we're making out on a couch, like a couple of kids!”

“I know.”

“Upstairs, there's a real bed.”

“I feel so damned ridiculous.”

“Oh, shut up, David,” she said.

Then they went upstairs.

For both David and Della it was a literal outburst of desire. Neither of them had ever made love that way before. For David, her body was like a pot of honey into which he plunged. She was a round woman, round limbs, round breasts, all of her given to him, welcoming him, receiving him, touching him as he had never been touched, kissing him as he had never been kissed — and he gave it back, caressing her, embracing her, biting her, going over every bit of her body, exploring it, as if he had never held a naked woman in his arms before.

Afterward, lying together on the bed, naked, side by side, David said, “It never happened with Lucy.”

“What never happened? David, you have two kids.”

“I don't mean that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don't know.”

“Are you happy now?”

“More than you can imagine,” staring at her well-formed naked body, the wide hips and full breasts.

“Not more than I can imagine, Rabbi. I have a Catholic friend who tells me how exciting it is to go to bed with her priest —”

“No. You're kidding.”

“David, you are absolutely the most innocent human being I have ever known. Tell me something, am I the first woman in the congregation you have ever taken to bed?”

“Of course.”

“Mother of God! Excuse me, I'm reverting. I'm half-Jewish. My mother was Jewish, my father was a sailor, a bum from Liverpool who walked out on my mother when I was two years old. I met Mel when I was sixteen, and he fell in love with me and took care of me and my mother until she died, and I turned Jewish. The whole thing. I took all my instructions even though I didn't have to, because Mom was Jewish, but I had spent six years in a Catholic orphanage, where she had to leave me. I'm not going to bore you with details, but that's how I can sort of straddle religions. What was I saying?”

“I've lost track of it.”

“Yes, no one in the congregation. Unbelievable.”

“Is that the truth, about your being half-Jewish?” David asked.

“Why not? Mel wanted it quiet, so I kept it quiet. I adored Mel. And you really think Martin Carter never strayed? Well, he did, you know.”

“I don't believe it. How could you know?”

“The lady told me.”

He got out of bed and began to dress.

“Are you going home?”

“It might put you in a difficult position.”

“Me? Oh, David, you are absolutely wonderful. It's beginning to rain and it's after midnight. Please get back into bed.”

Actually, there was nothing in the world he wanted more at this moment than to crawl back into that wonderful warm bed and embrace the ample bosom of this remarkable woman. But, instead, he told her that Mrs. Holtzman, who slept upstairs in what had been Sarah's room, would awaken in the morning to an empty house.

“Oh, no, you're putting me on.”

“No.”

She was gurgling with laughter now, and David, standing in his underwear briefs with his trousers in his hand, found that irresistible. He had never known anyone like this before, nor was he quite certain about what had convulsed her with laughter, the sight of the rabbi of Leighton Ridge in his underwear and his long skinny legs, or his woeful statement about Mrs. Holtzman. Whatever, he dropped the trousers and fell into bed, embracing her with a bear hug that took her breath away.

“David, David!” she begged him.

“Sorry, oh, I am sorry.”

She pushed him back, holding his arm, nodding admiringly at his long, flat muscles. “You are in good shape, aren't you, for someone who carries all the woes of the world on his shoulders. How old are you, David? Is it fifty?”

“Soon. Forty-nine.”

“The best time in a man's life. Of course, I'm old enough to be your mother.”

“Hardly. You're fifty-two, come January.”

“How do you know that?”

“I'm your rabbi, my darling Della.”

“Of course. So you are. You're almost fifty years old, you've been divorced for years, and you're afraid that Mrs. Holtzman will come into your bedroom tomorrow morning and discover that the bed hasn't been slept in.”

“Oh, come on — the way you put it.”

“How shall I put it, David? Doesn't it ever occur to you what an extraordinary person you are?”

“No, it does not,” he said firmly.

“Ah, well, we will talk about that another time. Do you know that at least a dozen women between here and Westport have been conniving to put their female offspring together with you in the bonds of holy matrimony?”

“No, I don't believe a word of that. You know, I do believe you invent things like that.” He reached out to touch her rounded breast, her straight hair, still cut in the same pageboy style as when he had first seen her, twenty years before.

“It was twenty years, wasn't it?”

“Perhaps a bit more,” she said, smiling. “I remember that first day you and Lucy came up here to the Ridge, and we all had dinner at Jack Osner's place. I thought you were just beautiful. I was always so jealous of that wife of his, eight feet tall with cheekbones sticking up like horns. She always made me feel like a fat, dumpy little woman. You know, he'll be Secretary of State. It's in the cards.”

“No one could ever think of you as a fat, dumpy little woman. You're marvelous.”

“Mother Earth?”

“You keep laughing at me,” David protested. “I do remember that hours ago we were talking about how ridiculous a rabbi could be. Am I still so ridiculous?”

“You're a delicious, sweet person, and I'm beginning to be madly in love with you. But I don't resemble Shelly Osner, not one bit.”

“Why should you?”

“Or Sarah Comstock, poor woman.”

“Good heavens, how do you know about that? It was ages and ages ago.”

“Rabbi, there are no secrets in a place like this.”

“No, no. I suppose not.”

“You have a congregation that loves you.”

“Yes, some of them.”

“Most of them,” Della said softly.

They lay side by side in silence for a while, and then David took her hand and looked at it and then kissed the palm.

“You're a gentle person. You make me feel like a young girl again.”

“And you make me feel alive.”

“And that is almost everything, to feel alive.
L'chaim,
as we say.”

“Almost everything. That — and love.”

“I went a few times to hear Martin preach. He's a very good preacher — not as good as you, David, but very good in that restrained
goyishe
way of his. He says God is love. Is that what you believe?”

“I don't know what God is. I hope that someday I will, but not now.”

“I want you to make love to me again. Do you think that's somewhat improper for two people our age?”

David burst out laughing, and Della said, “I can't remember seeing you laugh before tonight for ever so long. But I want you to stop it. You can't make love properly if you laugh.”

“We'll try,” he said, still laughing, and then, after they had made love a second time, Della said suddenly, “I want a cigarette. I want one desperately. I haven't touched one for months now, but you can't make love without a cigarette afterward.” She was rummaging in her night table drawer as she spoke. “Got it. Here, four of them,” holding up a crumpled pack. “Do you want one, David?”

“Never started.”

She lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply. “Ah — that is good. Oh, David, don't go off and pretend this never happened.”

“Not likely.”

“Oh, what loving words! Not likely.”

“Very loving in this context, Della. I loved Mel, I loved you. That went on for many years. Tonight was better than I could ever say. I don't think I'll walk away from you — but on the other hand —”