The Promise

by Chaim Potok

  “We never talked about that.”

  He looked away. “There are some things you don’t talk about.”

  “There’s nothing people don’t talk about these days.”

  “There are some things I don’t talk about.”

  “Danny.”

  He looked at me.

  “How long is it now?”

  “Since November.”

  “Is it really serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “Very serious?”

  “Yes.”

  “On both sides?”

  “More on her side than mine.”

  “Because she’s a Gordon?”

  “I don’t give a damn about her being a Gordon.”

  “Your father will give a damn.”

  “I’m not worried about my father. I’m worried about Michael.”

  “Are you working with Michael? I thought someone called Altman is working with Michael.”

  “They’re changing it. They’re going to try something else. It’s all wrong.”

  “You mean it’s wrong professionally. Is that what you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  I drank some more coffee. It was not so hot now as before.

  “You have no idea what a mess this can become.”

  “No,” I said. “I have no idea about that at all.”

  He drank some coffee and put the cup down on the desk next to the typewriter. The desk lamp shown on his face, bathing it in light and shadows. I saw him blink his eyes.

  “You’re making better coffee these days,” I said.

  “I’m learning.”

  “You’re learning about a lot of things.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “It’s called motivation. That’s what it’s called, isn’t it?”

  He looked at me and blinked his eyes.

  “You’ll be a twentieth-century man before you know it.”

  “You are angry.”

  “No,” I said. “I have no right to be angry. I’m not even surprised. There was nothing there.”

  “All right.”

  “Tell me about Michael.”

  He picked up his cup, sipped some coffee, and put it back down on the desk. “Michael is very sick,” he said.

  “Thanks. Now tell me something about Michael I don’t already know.”

  “You’re angry,” he said. “I can’t talk to you when you’re angry.”

  I said nothing. I finished the coffee and put the cup down on the floor and leaned back against the wall. The window shade fluttered softly and scraped against the sill. A faint hissing sound came from the radiator near the desk.

  “Tell me about Michael,” I said quietly. “Will I be able to visit him?”

  “Yes. I can arrange that now.”

  “He told me he’s driving Altman crazy. He bragged about it.”

  “He’s not driving him crazy. Professor Altman doesn’t get driven crazy by his patients. He’s a great therapist. But Michael isn’t cooperating.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He doesn’t do anything. He comes into a therapy session and just sits there. Or he spouts dreams and fantasies that are absolute lies. He won’t cooperate at all.”

  “Are you taking over the therapy?”

  “Under very close supervision.”

  “Isn’t that unusual?”

  “Yes.”

  “They have recognized your genius.”

  “They’re willing to try almost anything now. It’s very serious with Michael.”

  “Because he’s resisting therapy?”

  “There have been fist fights. Between Michael and some of the other boys. He hates to be called only by his last name. Some of the boys have latched on to that. He hates to be called Gordon.”

  “Fist fights,” I said. I could not imagine Michael in a fist fight.

  “He kicked a boy in the groin. During a lunch hour. He pushed him out of the chair and kicked him.”

  “God,” I said.

  “He has sex fantasies about Rachel.”

  I stared.

  “Those are the only fantasies he’s told us about that we think are real.”

  “God,” I said again. “Rachel.”

  “His father gave him a small Tanach.” “Tanach” is the acronym for the Hebrew Bible. “He got hold of some matches a few days ago and burned it in the bathroom. One of the child-care people smelled the smoke. It was completely burned. Ashes.”

  I stared at him and did not say anything.

  “Three days ago, Shabbos afternoon, he disappeared from the grounds. A child-care worker found him four blocks away, shouting obscenities at people coming out of a funeral parlor. You know what that does to the treatment center in terms of its relationship to the community? They’re uneasy with us around to begin with. He’s a very sick boy, your Michael. And we haven’t the least notion of what it is that’s bothering him.”

  “He doesn’t like very Orthodox Jews. I know that bothers him.”

  “That’s not what is really bothering him.”

  “The symptom, not the disease.”

  “Very good,” he said. “Go to the head of the class.”

  “I remember something at least from your days with Freud.”

  “Those were different days,” he said.

  “Why different?”

  “It’s always easier to learn something than to use what you’ve learned.”

  I did not say anything.

  “You’re alone when you’re learning. But you always use it on other people. It’s different when there are other people involved.”

  I was quiet.

  “You don’t want to make mistakes with people. Sometimes when you make a mistake you lose a human soul.” He used the Hebrew word “neshamah” for the soul, giving it his Ashkenazic pronunciation, “neshomeh,” and accenting the “sho.”

  I did not say anything for a long time. The noise of the radiator seemed suddenly very loud. I felt the wall cold against the back of my neck and moved forward slightly on the sofa bed. Danny finished his coffee.

  “What if you can’t get through to him?” I asked.

  He shrugged and said nothing.

  “How much time do you have?”

  “A month. Two months. It depends on whether there’s any kind of progress.”

  “What if there’s no progress?”

  He did not say anything.

  “What if there’s no progress, Danny?”

  He glanced down at his desk and said nothing.

  “Will he have to be institutionalized?” I said.

  He did not say anything.

  “My God,” I said. “My God.”

  We were silent. The shade scraped against the sill. Danny sat staring down at his desk.

  “I could use another cup of coffee,” I said.

  Danny got to his feet and brought the cup over to the sink.

  “Is it really all right for me to see him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do his parents know you’ll be working with him?”

  “Of course they know.”

  “The son of Reb Saunders working with the son of Abraham Gordon.”

  He came back with the coffee and went over to the desk and sat down. “I’m working with a human being,” he said.

  “Should I let him see that article by Rav Kalman? He wants me to bring it.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a disgusting article.”

  “I read it.”

  “It’s disgusting.”

  “The language is in bad taste.”

  “It’s disgusting,” I said.

  “All right.”

  “You really want me to show it to him?”

  “Yes.”

  I drank some coffee. “All because of a stupid carnival.”

  He looked at me. “Michael was sick long before that carnival. Crooks at carnivals don’t make people sick. You have to be sick already to be affected that way.”

  “We h
ad a beautiful time on that lake. He likes to read clouds. Did I tell you about that? He reads clouds.”

  “You told me.”

  I finished the coffee. “The summer seems very far away.”

  He was quiet.

  “It is far away,” I said. I put the empty coffee cup on the floor and leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes. I found I could not stop thinking about Michael. I heard the sounds of traffic and the vibrating hum of an aircraft. There was the lake again and Michael’s thin body near the center board of the Sailfish and the gusting wind and clouds scudding smoothly across the blue sky. I sat there and thought about Michael. I could not stop thinking about Michael. Danny was talking to me. I opened my eyes and saw him talking to me but I could not hear the words. There was the wind on the lake moving against the Sailfish and Danny talking to me. I listened to him talking to me. He was asking about Rav Kalman. I told him about Rav Kalman. The back of my neck was against the wall. I felt the wall vibrating as the aircraft passed overhead. I told him about Rav Kalman, and saw Michael standing up in the roller coaster, his face to the wind, and pulling up on the center board of the Sailfish, the muscles bulging in his long thin arms, and it seemed the sofa bed moved in the wind.

  “Nota Finkel?” Danny said. “Are you sure?”

  “He was head of the Slobodka Yeshiva. He died in 1928.”

  “I’ve heard of Nota Finkel. He was a musar teacher. Nathan Zvi Hirsch Finkel. Yes. He was a great anav.” “Anav” is the Hebrew word for a person of extreme modesty and gentleness.

  “He was a great Talmudist and a great musar teacher and a great anav. He was all of these things. There was a rebellion. Have you heard about the rebellion?”

  “What rebellion? Against Finkel?”

  “In 1905. A rebellion of the students in the Slobodka Yeshiva. He mentions it in the introduction to the book. They wanted more freedom. They wanted the right to read secular books and periodicals and newspapers. They wanted secular studies introduced into the school. A rebellion in a yeshiva. The Slobodka Yeshiva no less.”

  “I didn’t know anything about that.”

  “It’s in the book. You know what happened to the great and gentle teacher of musar? He stopped being gentle. He excommunicated some of the students and made sure no one in town would sell them food or clothes or rent them a place to live. He talked other students into coming over on his side. The ones who wouldn’t quit he had thrown out of town. End of rebellion.”

  “Rav Kalman couldn’t have been in that rebellion. You said he’s in his early forties.”

  “I didn’t say he was in it. I said he writes about it. He explains and justifies Finkel’s actions. It was for the sake of Torah, he says. It was in order to preserve Torah. I’ve got another Nota Finkel on my hands. Without the gentleness. A permanently ungentle Nota Finkel.”

  There was the cove and the smooth shallow water with the tall trees of the shoreline breaking the force of the wind and Michael lying on his back reading the clouds. There was the cove and the birds high overhead and the clouds white against the deep blue of the sky and the whisper of the wind through the trees, a loud whisper that was a roller coaster roar, and the sensation of dropping into the night.

  “We are at war, friend. Didn’t you know we are at war?”

  Danny said nothing.

  “The enemy surrounds us. The evil forces of secularism are everywhere. Look under the bed before you say the Kriat Shma at night. Look under the bed before you pray the Shacharit Service in the morning. And while you’re at it check the books on your desk and look in your typewriter and close the window because they come in with the wind. Did you know they come in with the wind?”

  “All right,” Danny said quietly.

  “The hell it’s all right. We become like dead branches and last year’s leaves and what the hell good are we for ourselves and the world in a mental ghetto. The hell it’s all right.”

  Danny said nothing. There was a tense silence.

  “I’ll survive,” I said.

  He was quiet.

  “If I can have another cup of coffee.”

  He smiled then and got slowly to his feet.

  “One derives great moral strength from a cup of coffee,” I said.

  “Kosher coffee,” Danny said.

  “Yes, of course. Kosher coffee. Of course.”

  We talked over the third cup of coffee, about ourselves, about the past, and there was silence and more talk and silence again and more talk. That was the best cup of all, that third cup of coffee. It took us a very long time to drink it.

  Then I was putting on my coat and hat and we were standing at the door.

  “Are those books some kind of project?”

  “Which books?”

  “The Byrd and the Zimmerman and the other one. I don’t remember the author’s name. Powys, I think.”

  “Yes,” he murmured. “A project.”

  “For class?”

  “Something like that.”

  “For a moment there I thought you were planning to practice solitude.”

  He gave me a queer look.

  “You won’t have much solitude if you and Rachel are really serious.”

  He did not say anything.

  “You’ll call me about the visit.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was good to talk to you again, Danny.”

  We shook hands. I went down the narrow staircase and into the street. The air was bitter cold and the wind blew stiffly from the river. I went up the street to the subway. I sat in the subway and felt Rav Kalman’s book in the pocket of my coat and took it out and began to reread the introduction. In the middle of the introduction I remembered Rachel telling me about Danny’s allusion to the Kotzker Rebbe. It was the Kotzker Rebbe and his twenty years of solitude I had been trying to remember when I had seen the books in Danny’s apartment. I sat there, staring down at Rav Kalman’s book and no longer seeing the words. It was after eleven o’clock. There were six people in the subway car. The man sitting opposite me was drunk. It seemed a long ride home.

  Eight

  The next day Rav Kalman called on me again. I read a long and fairly uncomplicated passage and he let me go on without interruption. I took a little too much time explaining one of the medieval commentaries and he told me to read on, the commentary was simple. I read on and continued explaining. At one point he stood near the window, his head inclined toward me, listening. We came to a difficult passage and I explained it. He stopped me. “Explain it again, Malter.” I explained it again. “Say again what the words mean, Malter.” I said it again. “That is how you explain it?” I told him that was how most of the commentaries explained it. He paced back and forth. “Read on, Malter.” I was in a nervous sweat by the time the shiur came to an end and got pitying glances from my classmates as we came out of the room.

  He did not call on me the following day. He called on someone else.

  I sat directly in front of his dark-wood desk and listened to the rain on the windows and the traffic on the wet asphalt street outside and the tense voice of the student who was reading. The student sat three seats away to my right, thin-shouldered, pale-faced, bent over his open Talmud, his voice faintly quavering. He had been reading for the past twenty minutes. A moment after he had begun to read it had become painfully obvious that he had come into the shiur unprepared.

  I had expected Rav Kalman to call on me again. He had entered the class promptly at one o’clock, walking very quickly, short, intense, immaculately dressed as always, starched white shirt, dark tie carefully knotted, trousers pressed. He had arranged his books on the desk, one piled neatly on top of the other, and had opened his Talmud and lit a cigarette, and had stood behind the desk, smoking, surveying the class intently, and tugging at his long dark beard. We all knew that the thing to do then was stare back at him whenever his eyes met yours because if you looked away it meant you had something to hide, you were unprepared, and you would be called on to read. I had
felt his dark eyes on my face a long time and had not looked away. The student three seats to my right had looked away immediately. Now he was reading.

  Rav Kalman smoked and paced and hurled questions. It had been an ugly twenty minutes so far.

  “Also what?” Rav Kalman asked. “What does ‘also’ mean?”

  The student struggled for an answer.

  Rav Kalman moved in front of him. His voice was thick with sarcasm. “That is what it means? How can that be what it means? Say again, Greenfield, what does ‘also’ mean?”

  Abe Greenfield finally managed to blurt out the answer. He was a fairly good Talmud student but it was obvious he was seeing the text for the first time. His face was pale and his eyes were frightened and filled with shame. He kept his eyes on the text and continued to read.

  A moment later, Rav Kalman stopped him again. “Included with what?” he asked sharply. “What is Resh Lakish saying?”

  Abe Greenfield stared down at his Talmud.

  “Included with what?” Rav Kalman persisted.

  I could see Abe Greenfield frantically scanning the commentary of Rashi.

  “Now you study Rashi?” Rav Kalman said. “Now? In class you study Rahi?”

  Abe Greenfield stared down at his Talmud.

  “Did you prepare the Gemora, Greenfield?”

  Abe Greenfield shook his head. He sat there, drenched in misery, and stared down at the Talmud and shook his head.

  “Nu, at least you are not prepared. If you had prepared and did not know I would wonder what you are doing in my class.” He paused. “Tell me, Greenfield, why are you not prepared?”

  He had not had time to prepare, Abe Greenfield said in a very small voice.

  I looked at him. Everyone looked at him.

  Rav Kalman tugged at his beard. “You did not have time? What do you mean, you did not have time?”

  Abe Greenfield stared down at his open Talmud and said nothing. I looked at him pityingly. He had said the one thing we all knew never to say to Rav Kalman, or to any Talmud teacher, for that matter.

  “There is sickness in your family?” Rav Kalman was saying. “You were not well?”

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, you did not have time?”

  There was a math exam in his graduate-school class that afternoon, Abe Greenfield said. A very important exam. He had needed all his time to study for it. He spoke in English in a low, tremulous voice.