The Outsider (34 page)

“And how does she feel about Aaron's being in jail?”

“Didn't she write to you?”

“Not about that.”

“He's her hero. Not only that, but it makes points for her, as she puts it, with her friends, a brother who had the guts to go to prison. That's the hero of the moment. She and the other girls hung a huge poster outside their dorm with that slogan that the kids have —
Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today
?”

“She never told me about that. Why didn't she? Doesn't she trust me?”

“David, you're her father, but you're also the rabbi. The kids adore you, but you're far away. You're always far away. You were always far away from me.”

“No, oh, no.”

“I'm sorry.”

They were almost back at Leighton Ridge when David said to her, “I'll drive you to the airport tomorrow.”

“I'd like that.”

“I thought you might like to have dinner with me. Mrs. Holtzman prepared enough food.”

“David, I wish you had asked me before. I can't. Martin and Millie are expecting me to have dinner with them.” She thought about it for a moment. “I suppose I could get out of it. Or you could join us. I'm sure they'll be happy to have you.”

“No, let it be. I'll see you in the morning.”

At the Carters' he didn't get out of the car. She leaned over to kiss him on the cheek, and by the time he pulled up at his own place, he was thoroughly depressed. In the house, Mrs. Holtzman called to him from the kitchen, “Shall I set two places, Rabbi?”

“One. Just one.”

“I'm sorry. I thought Mrs. Hartman would be eating with you.”

“No.”

“Your telephone messages are on your desk.”

He went upstairs to his study, feeling as lonely and abandoned as ever in his entire life. One of the messages was from Della Klein. He picked up the telephone and dialed her number.

“David,” she said, “you sound terrible. Did the prison get to you?”

“No. I think life got to me.”

“That's the worst, isn't it? Positively the pits, but one can't resign. After all, what's the alternative? How's Aaron?”

“All right. Just fine.”

“So the trouble's with you and Lucy. Are you having dinner with her?”

“No. She's at the Carters'.”

“Good. Let's you and me go out to some luscious place for dinner. We'll find something elegant if we have to drive twenty miles, and maybe we can take your mind off misery.”

“Thank you. You're a nice lady. I'll take a rain check.”

“Don't ever call me a nice lady.”

When David finally sat down to eat his dinner alone, Mrs. Holtzman brought in a steaming platter and told him, “I made pot roast, brisket the way you tell me your mother made it.”

“It smells wonderful.”

“Rabbi, I shouldn't talk like this, I have no right to, but it breaks my heart to see you eating here alone like this, night after night.”

“Delicious,” David said, tasting the meat. “It's not night after night, really, Mrs. Holtzman, but you're very kind to be so concerned. Never more than three times a week. I'm not forgotten. If I accepted even half the invitations from families in the congregation, I'd never have an opportunity to be alone. And I need to be alone now and then.”

“I know, Rabbi. Believe me.”

He slept poorly that night. He always slept poorly when he had an early rising hour, and in one of those short intervals of sleep, he dreamed once again of Dachau. He frequently had dreams of the concentration camp — sometimes terrifying nightmares, sometimes more placid dreams. This was a nightmare. In his dream, he was once again at the huge open mass grave where the bodies of Jews were piled like cordwood. In his dream, as so often before, he was one of the bodies in the grave, and though his eyes were open and though he was positioned so as to be able to look up and see the edge of the grave, his body was nevertheless stiff and immobilized with rigor mortis. As he lay there, chilled through and through with the icy cold of death, American soldiers began to gather at the edge of the grave. He shouted to them. He screamed at them. But no sound came, and now he saw that the American soldiers had shovels, and they began to shovel dirt into the grave. This had never happened in the previous dreams of the open grave. David exerted every effort to turn his screaming into sound, and suddenly he was awakened by his own screams, awake and trembling and covered with cold sweat.

For all of that, he felt quite refreshed in the morning, observing himself curiously as he shaved. Just short of fifty, he still was on the better side of baldness. His pale blue eyes were cradled in nests of tiny wrinkles, and lines were being etched between his nose and his mouth. His old army uniform still fit him, and if he had gained weight, it was no more than a pound or two.

Mrs. Holtzman had heard him scream. “You had a bad dream, Rabbi,” she said.

“Yes.”

“The concentration camp again?”

“Yes, I'm afraid so.”

“You remember, Rabbi, I told you that I was at Dachau when you and the other young men from America came and liberated us.” Her eyes filled with tears. It was always so when she spoke about Dachau.

“Yes, of course.”

She looked at him lovingly. She had created a script in her mind in which he was sometimes her child and sometimes her lover. “You know, Rabbi, I also had the most terrible dreams about Dachau, but you know what happened? When you told me how you were there with the beautiful young men who liberated us, the bad dreams stopped. In my mind, what you told me was like a blessing. A blessing can make miracles, yes?”

“Sometimes.”

She didn't know how to continue from there, and David sensed she felt she had said too much. She fed him instead, and he sat regarding with despair the huge breakfast she placed in front of him. He was late and he had to rush off, he explained, as apology for the food he left untouched.

Martin and Millie came outside with Lucy, Martin carrying her bags. It was a cold October morning, the air so clean and fresh that it almost crackled, the frost of the night still crunching underfoot.

“We'll be going to Toronto in a month or so,” Martin said. “It's been too long since we've seen Joe, and then, since we're partway across, we'd like to go on to California. We've never been there, and Millie is a dedicated movie fan —”

“What nonsense! Dedicated! But Lucy, if we come, could you truly get us into a studio?”

“I think so.”

The two women embraced and clung to each other. Martin shivered in the cold, and David reminded Lucy of the time. She was weeping again when she sat down in David's car.

“But why?”

“You think I have no feelings? Part of my life is here. Maybe some of it was the best part. I don't know.” Then, after a few minutes, she said, “It's no use. You can't go back. You can't, can you, David?”

“I don't know.”

“David, if I ask you a question, could you give me a truthful answer, free of pity or guilt?”

“I think I could.”

“All right. What would your answer be if I said, David, I don't want to go back to California. I want to stay here. I want to marry you again. I want to be your wife and live here with you.”

David was silent for a while, intent on his driving, while Lucy stared at his profile. Then, speaking slowly, “I'd have to say that I'm very flattered. And excited. Because I think I will always love you more than any other woman. I'm grateful, too, because in all honesty I felt rejected and abandoned. On the other hand, in two weeks or so, you would begin to hate me. You would hate yourself, because nothing evokes self-hatred as much as an act of self-destruction. You would be bored. As you said, you would hate the smallness of everything, the cold, the endless, miserable freezing winter, the fact that you have to drive twenty miles to see a film and sixty-five miles to a theater or a really good restaurant. You wouldn't have the children to care for or to distract you, and since we can't fire the teacher we hired to replace you, you wouldn't have that either.”

“Good God,” Lucy whispered.

“Perhaps I laid it on too thick.”

“Oh, no,” Lucy said. “Not at all. You're absolutely right. What a terrifying, dismal prospect! But you are right.”

“If it's any sort of consolation, ever since I laid eyes on you a few days ago, I've been ridden with lust, thinking about our nights in bed, years ago —”

“David, you're kidding.”

“No, it's the truth.”

“How sweet.”

“Working out the most intricate and ridiculous schemes to seduce you.”

“Why didn't you?”

“Lucy, I'm a rabbi.”

“Yes. I tend to forget that. Do you know, I think everything you just said is a lie.”

“You know I don't lie.”

“All right. There's a hotel at the airport —”

“Lucy darling — that way wouldn't be any good, would it? You know that.”

“No, it wouldn't, would it? I'll never know whether you're telling the truth, but it's a sweet thought, and thank you.”

•

PART EIGHT

1971

•

T
he tall, redheaded young man had evidently been provided with a description of David, for he pushed through the crowd at Washington's National Airport and with as much a statement as a question wanted to know whether David was not Rabbi David Hartman.

“And you know how I knew you, Rabbi,” he said enthusiastically, “aside from your picture in the temple bulletin? Please, let me take your suitcase. No hat. Reform rabbis don't wear hats. That's a dumb joke, isn't it? I recognized you from the picture. This way to my car, and —”

“Stop!” David said.

“Did I say something?”

“Take a deep breath. What's your name?”

“Teddy Berg.”

“Good. Now where are you taking me, Teddy?”

“To your hotel so that you can rest up a bit. Then Rabbi Gerson wants to join you for an early dinner. The service starts at eight and you're scheduled to speak at nine. I'm Rabbi Gerson's assistant, but I'm delighted to meet you just on a one-to-one basis. We should have over a thousand people tonight — you know, we're one of the largest temples in the East.”

“So I've heard.”

“And of course we're thrilled to have you here. If I may say so, you're in good company. Nixon spoke at the temple a few months ago, and in spite of what they say about him, the man comes across to you.”

“I'm sure he does.”

“We have a divergence of views, but he is the President of the United States.”

Sitting in his hotel room, so much like every other hotel room he had ever seen, David wondered why he had agreed to speak here. He had always made it a practice to speak only at colleges and universities, never at other synagogues or at churches, with the single exception of Martin's church.

At Martin's church, the Congregational church of Leighton Ridge, they felt a sort of possessive pride in Rabbi Hartman. After all, he had been at Leighton Ridge as long as anyone could remember, but even there David agreed sparingly to Martin's requests that he preach. “No one appointed me an apostle to the Gentiles, and anyway, you've been hammering away at these particular Gentiles for so long that if they haven't got the message, they will never get it.”

It was during that conversation, held at dinner, when Lucy was still his wife and he and Lucy were spending an evening with Martin and Millie, that they fixed on the question of why any man becomes a minister or a rabbi.

“For one thing,” Lucy said, “you cut yourself off. David feels he comes closer to people, but I don't see it that way. Oh, there are loads of people here who respect David, and I suppose some of them even venerate him, but you and Martin are our only real close friends.”

“Exactly,” Millie agreed. “Thank God for both of you.”

Martin shook his head.

“Martin denies it,” Millie said. “But ask him why he became a minister, and he'll tell you that there were nine generations of Congregational ministers in his family. On his mother's side, of course, not his father's — which to me means absolutely nothing, since his father was something else entirely.”

“There was also the fact that I had to live like a Christian.”

“Oh, nobody lives like a Christian,” Millie said. “You know what Mark Twain said about Christianity — an excellent religion that had never been tried.”

“It's been tried,” David said gently.

“David, you're not a Christian.”

“No. It's one less burden to bear. But Martin and I have talked about this. It's not easy to explain. In some ways, it's an indulgence, since each of us found something wonderful and precious, which brings a kind of selfishness into the picture. But I don't know where man is unselfish in anything he does. The doctor's oath says, Do no harm, but one also helps oneself. It would be very odd for me to say that at the age of nineteen, I faced my own life and found it meaningless; but I don't know how else to put it. I was a sophomore at City College in Manhattan. My father had died, and a younger sister whom I had adored had also died five years before. Just my mother and myself. I walked out of school one day and came home and talked to her; I told her how I felt, empty, worthless, with no hope anywhere. I don't know why I did it. It was cruel of me. She began to cry. She was frightened. So I put my arms around her, and she managed to say to me, ‘Do you believe in God, David?' I left the house and walked for hours, and I ended up at the Institute. I think I want to be a rabbi, I said to them, and they told me to come back when I felt more certain about it. I finished the semester at City College and I went back to the Institute, and I was admitted.”