To Rise Again at a Decent Hour (12 page)

“To Judaism? Not likely. The Amalekites were godless savages. They only knew camel thieving.”

“What happened to them?”

“What happened to any of them?” he said, resuming running his fingers through his hair. “The Hittites, the Hivites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Edomites, the Jebusites, the Moabites. Did they assimilate into the dominant tribes? Did they evolve into Indo-Europeans? Or did they simply die out?”

“But there are four hundred left at the end of the story,” I said.

“According to this,” he said, indicating the printout. “But this is quite at odds with the biblical account, quite at odds indeed.”

“What’s the biblical account?”

“Those four hundred men are blotted out.”

“Blotted out?”

He smiled at me in a way that suggested pleasure in ancient bloodshed. “Extinguished. Exterminated. At God’s command, of course.”

He swiped his thumb across his wet tongue once more and shuffled again through his King James.

“ ‘And some of them, even of the sons of Simeon,’ ” he recited, “ ‘went to mount Seir… and they smote the rest of the Amalekites.’ ” He sat back. “The first genocide in documented history.”

I called up “my” comment on the
Times
website and read it to him.

“ ‘A people risen out of the ashes of the exterminated Amalekites,’ ” Sookhart repeated slowly. He stared at me while pensively finger-combing his flossy pets. “Now who’s that supposed to be?”

When I was in love with Sam Santacroce, I took an interest in Catholicism. I learned how the word “popish” became a slander and of all the prejudices Catholics faced when they first came to America. This was not a popish country, and the settlers and revolutionaries, who were almost exclusively of one Protestant stripe or another, openly doubted the patriotism of Catholics, because Catholics were naturally loyal only to Rome. Protestants did everything they could to keep Catholics out, and when that didn’t work, they kept them contained to (if memory serves) the newly formed state of Maryland. I was shocked. I never realized that there was such a violent divide between Christians, whose central figure was found most often (when not hanging dead from a cross) in the company of lambs and children. But in fact the Christians really distrusted and hated one another, and because the Santacroces
were Catholic, because they were for me everything honest and good, with their epic egg hunts and shiny foreign sedans and a succession of dead dogs fondly recalled—everything, in other words, that America promised—I sided with the Catholics.

One night, after Sam and I had gotten back together, when I was more prone to finding fault with the Santacroces and yet still smitten with the idea of becoming one myself in flesh and spirit, of transforming myself into pure Santacroce sanctity, I said to Bob Santacroce, while a holiday party raged all around us, “I can’t believe how the Catholics have been treated over the years.” I proceeded to share with him some of the history I had learned when Santacroce mania was at its zenith. I cited the execution of Thomas More, the Whore of Babylon slander against the see of Rome, and the loyalty oaths designed to keep Catholics from holding local office here in America. “Then there was that whole Philadelphia Nativist Riot of 1844,” I said casually. I had yet to mention the unprecedented reassurances that candidate John F. Kennedy had had to offer the country that he would not be beholden to the pope. Bob Santacroce was a big man with dark blond hair and restless blue eyes who called me, with no intent to offend, I was assured, but for reasons I never comprehended, Hillary. “Yes,” he said, his eyes finding me again, there in front of him, which suddenly sparked a thought. “Hey, how’s the apartment working out for you?”

For all intents and purposes, Sam and I lived together, but to ease the complications of explaining to friends and family this scandalous premarital arrangement, the Santacroces offered to pay the rent on an apartment let in my name, which would sit empty but would provide her parents with some much-needed cover. When, however, the Santacroces would come to visit us—or when friends of Sam’s who had parents who were friends with the Santacroces, and who might spread gossip where it was least wanted,
came to visit—I would be asked to spend some time at “my” apartment. I might be asked to spend the entire night there if it meant the Santacroces didn’t have to part with us in the evening with me still loitering around “Sam’s” apartment and be forced to reckon with the sinful implications. I agreed to maintain this illusion—me, of all people!—at Sam’s urging and under the passing influence of a sympathy for monstrous distortions. Without monstrous distortions, I was slowly learning, without lies and hypocrisy, one cannot have the idealized American life I so longed for. Perfection was marred only by those corruptions necessary to its enterprise.

“It’s working out fine,” I said to Bob. “It was nice of you guys to buy me the bed.”

“Well,” he said, “we figured you probably didn’t have much money left over after schoolbooks and whatnot.”

“That’s true,” I said. “I’m pretty broke most of the time.”

“And you don’t want to be sleeping on the floor.”

“No,” I said. “That wasn’t fun.”

“Hillary,” he said, “it’s time for me to find a new martini.”

Later on at the party, we listened to him share stories with a pair of old fraternity brothers of all the ways they had cheated on tests and papers during their days at Drexel University.

It was preposterous to expect a man so at ease in the world, so unburdened by its concerns, as Bob Santacroce to worry about wronged Catholics of a bygone era. He didn’t give a good goddamn about anti-Catholicism, which had never hindered him from making friends or acquiring wealth. That I felt these injustices keenly—that I took them personally because I looked at the Santacroces and failed to comprehend how such good people could be the target of anyone’s hate—was a confession of love I could not reasonably expect Bob Santacroce to puzzle out. And obviously
I knew nothing about good timing or common sense. He was really just a simpleminded man with a winning personality who grabbed hold of opportunity and rode to fortune with a smile. And he had four martinis in him. If only I had been the kind of person who talked baseball at parties, I might have become his son-in-law.

When I met the Plotzes, I was determined to talk sports, weather, celebrity gossip, new car models, political scandals, the price of gasoline, the right putter, and a thousand other things of perfect inconsequence. I had taken a vow of restraint with Connie, which meant a vow of restraint with her family, which prohibited me from acting like a horse’s ass. And why not? I was thirty-six, an educated man, a successful dentist with a thriving practice. What did I have to prove? Before I came along, Connie had brought around a chigger’s feast of unwashed musicians and poets manqué who, I learned from offhand remarks, plundered the wine and felt up the sofa cushions. At least I drew a salary. All that was required of me to be tolerated at the Plotz family table was to smile and be respectful. In time that might lead to being accepted, even embraced. If I remained faithful to that simple approach, I told myself, they may even one day come to love me.

But the Plotzes were not predisposed to the peanut chatter of a Santacroce cocktail party. At Plotz gatherings, one Plotz talked over a second only to be shot down by a third. No casual approach to life here. They were thick in the politics of the day, both ours and Israel’s, and had opinions. Each opinion was offered more vigorously and with a fuller throat than the last, and each was a matter of life and death. Even trifles like books and movies and recipes and who parked where and why and how much time was put on the meter were matters of life and death. These were people who, their ancestors having worked as peddlers and merchants on
the Lower East Side to put the next generation through night school, took nothing they’d earned for granted. They weren’t frivolous. I liked them for that and respected them more than I did the Santacroces. And so while I was disposed, by age and my own success and by lessons learned the hard way, to be more restrained, I was also completely taken by this excitable clan, by their lively talk, and by their solidarity—by my first experience with a family of American Jews.

The most unfortunate thing about being an atheist wasn’t the loss of God and all the comfort and reassurance of God—no small things—but the loss of a vital human vocabulary. Grace, charity, transcendence: I felt them as surely as any believer, even if we differed on the ultimate cause, and yet I had no right words for them. I had to borrow those words from an old dead order. And so while it was not a word I used, when I fell in love with Connie and became acquainted with the Plotzes, I felt blessed.

Although I mostly kept myself in check, I did do one or two questionable things. I’ve already mentioned the compliments I handed out at Connie’s sister’s wedding and my enthusiasm dancing the hora. Then there was the time, with Connie just out of earshot, when I impulsively offered her uncle Ira and aunt Anne free dental care for life.

“Come in anytime,” I said, handing Ira my business card. “You don’t even need to make an appointment.”

Ira turned the business card over, scrutinizing the blank side, before handing it off to his wife.

“I have a dentist,” said Ira. “I need two?”

“The man is just trying to be nice, Ira,” said Anne, who waved off her husband’s remark and thanked me for my offer. “But it’s true,” she added. “We’ve been seeing the same dentist for twenty years. Dr. Lux. Do you know Dr. Lux?”

I shook my head.

“There’s no reason you should, he’s in New Jersey. They don’t make them any finer than Dr. Lux.”

“Well,” I said, “consider it a standing offer. You might need someone in an emergency.”

“If I had an emergency,” said Ira, “I’d call Lux.”

Anne frowned. “What he means to say is thank you,” she said to me.

Around that time I started studying Judaism. I would go to the library and read whenever I had the chance. It was never stories of the Romans (too remote) or the Nazis (too familiar) that got to me, but episodes of a smaller scale: a handful of Jews falsely accused of something absurd and killed and all their earthly goods immediately converted into cash by the local clergy; fifty Jews burned on a wooden platform in the cemetery, and their cries reported clinically in a Christian’s journal; children taken out of the fire and baptized against the will of their mothers and fathers who were forced to watch as they burned. The world never seemed so wicked, so rabid, or so diseased, as in the pages of the history of the Jews. The world never seemed so irredeemable. And I’d want to say something to someone about it, something inadequate and likely to go over as well as my misbegotten attempt to connect with Bob Santacroce over anti-Catholicism, which, in the context of the history of anti-Semitism, was a luncheon on a riverboat. I wanted most of all to say something to Connie’s uncle Stuart. I don’t know why. His dignity, maybe, his prepossession. The strange impression he gave of eating very little, of having transcended food, of finding nourishment in other, higher-order things, in Torah and in silence. But I resisted these urges. Connie’s uncle Stuart didn’t need my apologies for historical injustices for which I could not reasonably be held to account. And I didn’t want him to
think I was attempting to apologize or that I was pitying him and all the Jews that came before him. I just wanted him to know that I knew. But what did I know, exactly? Even if I knew everything—absolutely everything of Jewish history, Jewish suffering, Jewish theology, which was impossible—so what? I could go up to Uncle Stuart, I thought, and say, “I’ve been reading about the Crusades,” or “I’ve been reading about the pogroms,” or “I’ve been reading about the forced conversions.” But would I be saying something about the Crusades, the pogroms, and the forced conversions, or only something about myself? I suspected that, just as I had so earnestly done earlier with Bob Santacroce, I was really only saying something about myself. Unlike Bob Santacroce, however, Stuart Plotz gave a damn. I was afraid I’d start in soberly on these subjects, and Uncle Stuart would hear only, “The Crusades, hey! The pogroms, hey! The forced conversions, wow!” as if it were some kind of hit parade of outrage easy to be on the right side of at this late stage in history. I had vowed to keep a leash on my romantic empathies, and the history of anti-Semitism, the expulsion of Jews from France and Spain and England, the death of millions in the Holocaust—their magnitude encouraged that restraint, made it an imperative.

Then one night at a birthday celebration for Theo, a cousin of Connie’s, I made an error.

It’s not strictly true that I’ve been an atheist my whole life. Before my dad died, my parents were very indifferent parishioners of a Protestant church we attended maybe a handful of times, with no operating principle behind when we did or did not attend—except for one time when I was eight and we went six consecutive weeks, including Sunday school and Wednesday potlucks. It was my father’s idea, one of his lurching efforts to avoid an accident by running us all off the road. It was probably suggested to him that
God was the answer to what ailed him, including his tendency to bring home all the irons for sale at the Sears and then stand over the sink and cry while my mom returned them. (Picture me during these episodes watching him from a healthy distance, as puzzled by adult behavior as I was unsettled by his crying.) Then, after his death, my mom, in what I imagine now to be one of many desperate attempts to organize her response to the inconceivable, cycled through a series of churches—the Baptist church, the Lutheran church, the Episcopal church, the Assemblies of God church, and the Disciples of Christ church, vanilla churches and evangelical churches, churches preaching damnation and churches preaching donation… and then back home again to sit on the sofa and mourn in the everyday way of most Americans: in the communal privacy of the TV.

During that time, however, I came to learn, from women who bent down and put their hands on their knees, from men in black who were always stacking chairs, and from old deacons who encouraged me to climb into their laps, that God was alive and present and looking over me. God was almighty and kind and took away all bad things. He had sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to die for our sins, and Jesus would love me if only I let Him. If I loved Jesus with all of my heart, He would give me my dad back in a sweet place called heaven. Dad’s wounds would be healed and his sins forgiven. He would never again know sadness, Mom would love him and never cry, and in the afterlife the three of us would never be parted. And because I wanted to believe it so badly, for a time I believed.