The Outsider (38 page)

Back at his office, Mrs. Shapiro said to him, “I've been on the phone all morning, Rabbi, but I think it's all in hand. The funeral parlor will ship the body to the airport, and then it goes by air cargo, and they come into Kennedy at five o'clock in the morning. I had to make arrangements for the coffin to be held until the hearse gets there, which won't be until eight o'clock. The hearse will get here some time before noon, I don't know exactly when, so you'd better schedule the burial for three o'clock or so. Weather says it will be a very nice day, if you want to have an outside service.” Mrs. Shapiro had become older, stouter, and marvelously competent.

He was about to say that the decision would be up to his wife, but he stopped himself. He praised Mrs. Shapiro and then went outside. His invitation for Lucy and her husband to stay with the Carters had been rather cavalier, and he thought he would drive over to Martin's place and apologize. As he came out of the synagogue, he heard his name called from the direction of the old Congregational church, which had housed the synagogue and which had been subsequently sold to the Unitarians. The old church and the synagogue were about a quarter of a mile apart, and now David saw a young man striding hurriedly toward the synagogue.

He came up to David with the question “Rabbi Hartman?”

As David turned to the young man, he became aware that Mrs. Shapiro had followed him. “One moment, please,” David said.

“The thing is,” Mrs. Shapiro whispered, “that this is going to cost a fortune, Rabbi. Almost a thousand dollars. Who will pay for it?”

“I will.”

“But you shouldn't have to.”

“Please,” he begged her. “Not now, please.” He walked over to where the young man was waiting and said, “You must forgive me. My mother-in-law just died in California. We're trying to make some arrangements.”

“Of course, Rabbi. I don't want to intrude at a moment like this. I simply wanted to introduce myself. I'm Steven Woodsman, and I'm the new pastor at the Unitarian church. Since we're such close neighbors, I feel we should know each other. We have many Jews in our membership.”

“Do you indeed!” David said coldly.

“I only meant —”

“I know precisely what you meant,” David said, cutting him off. “I'm glad to have met you, Mr. Woodsman.” With that, he turned around and strode across to where his car was parked. Once in the car, driving toward Martin's house, he tried to understand what had come over him. How many times Lucy and Della had berated him for a lack of anger, and here he was seething with anger.

“And I really can't say why,” he told Martin a while later. “I put down this poor young fellow with the most disgusting behavior.”

“I'm sure it was not that disgusting, David. You haven't done a quick change into Mr. Hyde.”

“But I've always known that half the membership of that Unitarian church were Jews. As a matter of fact, I've lured away at least a dozen families through the years, and the Unitarians, Jewish or otherwise, are very nice people.”

“You and I,” Martin said, “we do have the right to resort to anger.”

“Well, when things ease up, I'll seek him out and apologize. You will forgive me for inviting Lucy and her husband to a night of bed and board at your place.”

When Martin told his wife about the incident, Millie said, “Martin, don't you see what's happening? David's in the process of becoming an angry old Jew.”

“What a thing to say!”

“I don't mean it as anything derogatory. I adore David. But I think his time of childhood and innocence is over. He's been brought up and has lived as a damned, bloodless Wasp, no different from you and me. That's over, I think. He's converted and turned Jewish, and now he's in the process of becoming a prophet. You know your Bible. There was nothing nice about the prophets. They thundered and raged and denounced greed and injustice. You wouldn't want to have one of them in your living room, but they were something.”

Looking at his wife in astonishment, Martin said, “You feel that? It's very interesting, but I wonder.”

And at that moment, David was saying to Della, “Yes, I finally figured it out. I don't want any young cub of a Unitarian minister telling me about a congregation full of Jews who haven't enough brains and guts, not to mention grace, to remain Jews. No, sir! I do not want that!”

Della doubled up with laughter, and David said indignantly, “You're laughing at me.”

“With you, with you. Oh, David, all those people want is to stop being Jewish without converting. Same as your letter from Salt Lake City, where you can finally be a Gentile and remain Jewish.”

“It stinks,” he said flatly.

“David, you've never said anything like that in your life. What am I marrying?”

“We'll work that out.”

“I suppose we will.” Della sighed. “I do suppose we will.”

David was in his office at the synagogue the following morning when Lucy arrived, and as he stood up, she went to him and threw her arms, around him. “David, David, David.” In her forty-ninth year, Lucy was still a most attractive woman, her features hardened somewhat, her skin tighter as a result of a face-lift David did not even suspect, her figure trim and tightened by hours of Los Angeles exercise classes. “Oh, David,” she sobbed, “the whole thing is lousy. Life is such a bag of crud. Mom is gone, and I have no one. The kids do their own thing and don't even know that I exist.”

“You have your husband,” David said gently.

“And so have five other women. Oh, hell, why am I crying on your shoulder? I made my own bed. As for Bob Greene, he's too busy. Too goddamned busy to come to my mother's funeral.”

“Death is awful,” David said. “It's the black monster that lives with us always, but it's also a part of being. Don't brood over Bob's problems. Your mother had love and a wonderful daughter and two fine grandchildren. By the way, where are they?”

“You think that? I mean, you say a wonderful daughter. The kids will be here. Aaron was in Los Angeles and Sarah in Arizona. David, there was a time, wasn't there, when families stayed together?”

“Yes, but now it's different.”

“Everything is.”

“We made all the arrangements, Lucy. The casket will be brought here, and your mother will lie beside your father.”

She had drawn back, but now she embraced him again. It felt good to have her in his arms, something familiar and comforting out of long, long ago. “David, you were always so good to me. My life stinks, David. I could come back here now. I could hack it here.”

“That's an odd way to put it, Lucy.”

“I know. Just talk. As you told me once before, a week or two here and I'd go crazy.”

He was not going to talk to her about Della, but she picked up on that and said, “Oh, David, you're not going to marry Della Klein, are you?”

“Yes. I didn't want to tell you now.”

“And how would you keep it from me here where everyone knows when the rabbi sneezes? How can you do it, David? You're a wonderful man. How can you live out your life in this crummy hole? It's nothing, and Della is a fat, frowsy, middle-aged housewife. There's a world out there. If you want to be a rabbi, there are other places to be a rabbi. There's a temple in Sepulveda Pass in Los Angeles that makes this synagogue look like Martin's church compared to Saint Patrick's Cathedral. Why are you doing this?” She broke into tears again, and David took her in his arms.

“It will be all right, darling.”

At the cemetery, at the open grave, David said, “We say goodbye now to a lovely and gracious woman. We are not a funerary religion. We honor life, not death, and the reward we look to is here, in the life we live and the people we love and who love us. Sally Spendler, my mother-in-law and dear friend, was a woman well loved and richly rewarded.”

After all the others had gone, Lucy and David and their two children remained at the grave for a time. “Will it be taken care of?” Lucy asked, pointing to the mound of raw dirt. “And who will see to the stone?”

Aaron, tall, lean, stood with his arm around her. “Pop will take care of those things.”

“Of course,” David said. Sarah was next to him, her hand in his. Even with death, as he told Della later, it was a good moment. Even though Lucy said unhappily, “I've left instructions to be cremated when the time comes, David, so don't save space for me.”

At the airport, she said to him, “I don't know when I'll see you again, David. I can't come running once you're married.”

“I'm here.”

“All right, my dear David.” And then she threw her arms around him and kissed him. She was alone on the plane.

Aaron and Sarah had been dropped off by David in New York. They wanted to spend a day or two in the city before they went home.

Almost as if it had never happened. He had once asked Martin, “How often do you see your kids?”

His son, Joe, was established in Canada and a Canadian citizen now. “Eight months ago was the last time,” Martin had said. “How time flies!” Martin's daughter, Ellie, was living in Boston, married to an M.I.T. professor. “She tries to get down here with her kids every few months — well, sometimes only at Christmas.”

“On the other hand,” Della said, “how would you feel if they needed you every moment of the day? They're independent. That counts for a lot.”

A few weeks later, David said to Della, “I've been talking to the board, and they feel we should be married in the synagogue in a public sense.”

“Oh, the hell with them,” Della said. “We're not kids. Let's go to City Hall and get it over with.”

“There's no city hall at Leighton Ridge. You know that. There isn't even a judge or a magistrate, only the First Selectman, and I'm not even sure that he has the right to perform a marriage. You seem to forget I'm a rabbi. The first thing you give up when you become a rabbi is the right to say the hell with them.”

“Then get a rabbi,” Della said. “I'm amiable. How about that old man, Rabbi Belsen, whom you talk about?”

“May he rest in peace — twelve years now.”

“I'm sorry. Oh, anyone, David.”

David called Bert Sager. “Will I marry you?” Rabbi Sager asked. “Only if you're a woman, and even then I'd think twice about it. You are too old and too skinny. Like our eminent precursor, Socrates, I learned about marriage the hard way. Forgive me, David, I have a primitive sense of humor, and I make childish jokes. As so many in my congregation say, a rabbi with a sense of humor who is funny is an asset, but a rabbi with a sense of humor who is not funny is expendable. So if you want me to perform a ceremony, let's do it while I still have a congregation. By the way, whom are you marrying?”

“Della Klein.”

“Blessings. I don't know the lady, but she sounds Jewish.”

“I think she is,” David said.

“Good, good. You know, it must be seen as a sort of a
Mitzvah
when a Conservative rabbi like myself marries one of the Reform faith. Where will the ceremony be and when?”

“A week from Sunday, noon, at our synagogue here in Leighton Ridge. Please bring your wife. We're planning nothing very grand, my two kids if I can get them to come, Della's kids, and some old friends. We'll have the ceremony at the synagogue, and then a buffet dinner at Della's home, so if you could plan to stay on until late in the afternoon, that would be very pleasant.”

To David's amazement, both his children turned up in Leighton Ridge the day before the wedding, each alone, having managed to dispense for a few days with their mates — “just in terms of the cost of air fare,” Sarah explained. At twenty-two, she was an impossibly healthy, freckled, clear-eyed woman. Her brother, Aaron, explained further, “Well, it's a kind of a special thing. We always looked at Della and Mel as part of the family. I don't recall Mel too well, but we both remember him warmly.” Della's three children were their old friends. “You didn't expect them, did you?” Della said to David. “I mean, so soon after coming here for the funeral.”

David nodded, his eyes moist. Rabbi Sager said to him, “You know, Hartman, I've known you a long time, but I've never seen you in this context. With your reputation as some kind of wild-eyed radical, raging at the evil in high places, denouncing war, going to prison, turning up on every picket line within a hundred miles of here for over a quarter of a century — it doesn't jibe. You're a very sweet and quiet man, and these people adore you, and that includes even my wife, who doesn't like rabbis very much.”

David nodded. He didn't trust his voice.

He and Della were married on the
bimah,
the platform at the front of the synagogue, where he had stood and preached, ever since the new synagogue had been built in the little village on the Connecticut ridge.

At Della's house, packed with friends, including Mike Benton, who had come in from the Coast, Martin said to David softly, “We've both been privileged, old friend. There are moments when a human being must do what we do as an audience in the theater, enter a suspension of disbelief. It gives us a moment of clarity to thank God for all things.”

Later that evening, when all the guests had gone, David told Della what Martin had said.

“I think I understand,” she said uncertainly.

“You see,” David said, “the disbelief is the crutch for evil — or so some of us see it. Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil, but it's the mindless childishness of evil that hurts us.”

“Oh, yes, yes.” Della sighed. “On the other hand, it's late and we've had a long day, and all I know, Rabbi, about God or anything else, is that there's a great darkness out there, and a man or a woman should not sleep alone. I'm happy to be your wife, and I love you, and I'm lucky. Shall we go to bed?”