I was a Godian. I believed in God. Channa was an atheist and did not.
Channa and I had enjoyed our honeymoon on Nantucket Island in March, when we got sunburns one day and were snowed in the next. Our second honeymoon came during that summer. Professors of mine in Berkeley had pursued me over the years to come back and to do a doctorate, so I answered their call. Fortunately, Channa’s real estate syndication employer in Boston had just opened a San Francisco office, and they agreed to send Channa out there to help get it going.
For our second honeymoon, we drove Channa’s grandmother’s old Dodge sedan, slowly, across the country. Its enormous backseat was filled with bedding, so at night we alternately slept and drove, while remaining on the highway and knocking off the miles. But during the day we would leave the highway and meander wherever the map intrigued us or where the Lord pointed us to go.
It was a wonderful second honeymoon.
It was about to get even better.
CHAPTER TWENTY
One June day, almost two years after we moved to Berkeley, Channa called the hospital and described a particular event. The nurse responded that Channa had better come in later that evening. I knew everything to do. Everything was already packed. I had run every possible route to Alta Bates hospital at any time of the day, in any traffic condition, in any weather condition. The car was always full of gas; there was always an envelope of cash in the glove compartment in case at that moment we were—ah, broke. We dashed—slowly, because Channa was an elephant and elephants need time to place their feet just so. Twelve hours later, we held our daughter Lena in our arms.
And twelve hours later, Channa knew, absolutely, that God is.
There was nothing to keep us in California. I had finished my coursework and had only the dissertation left to go, and Channa had left her company and begun freelance editing during her pregnancy, which meant work could travel with her. Desperately missing New England weather and greatly burdened by the fact that we had missed the famous blizzard of ’78, we decided it was time to bid Berkeley adieu.
We were moving back to Maine!
Camden, Maine, is a pretty, coastal town—into whose harbor I had sailed many times. At that time, Camden was the location of one book publisher and three magazine publishers. Surely, with my skills, I could get work in Camden, and we would live a perfect life.
We arrived in Maine in midsummer and stayed at Undercliff. Daily, I drove the almost two hours, one way, from Undercliff to Camden, looking for work and a place to live. Daily, I returned with neither leads nor success.
Just as desperation was beginning to set in, we happened upon a house we liked, an old Cape Cod with a massive collapsing barn, up above the town, with a view across a lake to a mountain. I went to talk with the director of a local bank whose business was growing and whom I had heard might have a sense of humor. I needed a man with a sense of humor.
Was I married? Yes. Did I have children? Yes. Did I have a job? No. What skills did I have? Editing, writing, building if I needed to. Why should I give you a mortgage? Because you want to, otherwise you wouldn’t be talking to me. That cracked him up. He looked me up and down. Well, he said, you look to me like a man who can support his family. Okay, I’ll give you that mortgage.
A day or two later, one of the restaurants called. You still available? Yes. Our chef just quit. Can you start tonight? Sure.
So I cooked and wrote; Channa waitressed and edited. Lena sat bundled up next to the woodstove in the living room fascinated by the fast talking of our friends at our parties. My first novel, On the Verge, was published, and the same publisher bought my second novel, Paradise, a vigorous nautical and theological adventure set in the sixth century AD. And somehow, despite the fact that I came home from work at midnight stinking of garlic and shrimp, Channa was pregnant again.
Then suddenly, with no warning, the man who owned the restaurant tired of it and closed it. The only compensation the other chef and I received was the right to empty the walk-in refrigerator of anything stored there and to take it home for our personal use. So—though Channa and I were back to being broke—for several months we fed our family (and lots of our friends) with beef tenderloins, extra-colossal shrimp, hand-trimmed smoked hams, and veal medallions, and I could whip up coquilles Saint-Jacques using perfect, individually flash-frozen, deep-ocean scallops that were the best to be found north of Boston.
About two months after the restaurant closed, the phone rang. It was the man who had chaired my doctoral committee in Berkeley. He had just accepted a new position as president of Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, and he wanted to know if I would be available to move to Hartford right away to take a faculty-level position administering the seminary’s library, archives, and bookstore while advising doctoral candidates. He named a salary that included faculty housing and sounded astounding to an out-of-work chef who had a toddler and a pregnant wife—now a very pregnant wife.
Hmmm, I was planning to change the oil in the car, but, well, let me think . . .
So we rented out our house in Camden, on the cool coast of Maine, and we arrived in sweltering Hartford.
My first assignment was to turn around the seminary’s moribund bookstore by the end of the summer—with the budget necessary to do so, as approved by the board. As it happened, one of the members of the board was Katharine Hepburn’s sister, and as we got to know her—just a little—it was fascinating to hear her speaking in one room of our house when we were in another. She and her sister had exactly the same intonation. I would refill the appetizer tray while listening to the movie star’s voice in the other room and then come back expecting to pass the crackers to Spencer Tracy.
Two weeks after we arrived in Connecticut, our son James was born, two days after Lena’s second birthday.
James, that fine son, was the easiest of Channa’s births. By then, Channa knew all about having babies. She’s a quick study, my wife. She’s also generously interested in the welfare of those around her. What with the tension of the move at the height of her pregnancy, Channa had been very conscious of pain—of my pain, that is. I’d hurt my back lugging stuff. So there she was, this hugely pregnant woman, almost fully dilated and with regular, cramping contractions, being wheeled into the birthing room with her husband holding her hand.
Channa turned to the nurse. “Do you have any aspirin?”
The nurse looked at her with an amused smile. “Honey, I don’t think that’s going to help.”
Channa burst out laughing. “No, not for me. It’s for him.”
Just a few pushes later, there he was: James—congenial from the first, loyal, affectionate, tender, smart, a teaser. We brought James home, and we showed him to Lena in his bassinette. Lena was delighted with her new toy.
So there we were—two young ’uns, a real job for me that could lead to a career, one novel published and another—sold!—nearing completion. It almost felt as though I was actually, finally, for once in my life, doing something.
Then . . .
One day, when Lena was five and was lying in our hammock with me, she injected her own theology into what was still our family’s Godianity. The day was windy and cold. It was late autumn. Lena and I enjoyed our hammock swing. Then she, normally an eager chatterer, fell silent.
After a bit, she said, “Daddy, I can tell there’s a God.”
This enchanted me. “How, sweetie?”
“See the leaves?” She gestured at the tree above us. “You can’t see the wind, but it’s there. You can’t see God . . .” She hesitated.
“But you know He’s there?” I prompted.
“Yes,” she nodded. “He makes people move, like the leaves.”
Then she pondered some more and snuggled against me and whispered, “And God can be cold sometimes too.”
Thus, the daughter of a Godian!
Lena had more on her mind. My doctorate had enriched our family with the greatness of human artistic striving in order to touch the divine (not to ment
ion, it had given me my job), but Lena had a question, and her question was pointed.
“Daddy, what do we believe?”
Plunk!
Lena had tossed a stone into my serene religious pond.
I did not like it that I could not answer her question.
Despite Channa’s rich Jewish heritage—her great-grandfather had been an Orthodox rabbi—and my seminary education, really, Channa and I knew very little about any actual religion, be it Judaism or Christianity—or any other kind of religion, including the religious consciousness of dolphins. Of course, I had two master’s degrees and a PhD and could talk quite a lot about the Bible and the paintings and novels that came from its witness, but what good did that do when it came down to actually believing something?
So Channa took a comparative religion course at the seminary, and I, being an academic, thought and thought.
Godianity was out. That was final. It would be either Christianity or Judaism.
I did not get it about Jesus, so Jesus and the religion about Him were out. On the other hand, I loved the humanity, the clarity, the justice, and the exuberance of the Hebrew Bible—which is such a great human story—in which Yahweh has our best interests at heart, even when His people refuse to recognize that it is so.
Okay, then. Resolved: the children will be raised as Jews.
This would be Channa’s deal, since she was already Jewish, and the children, therefore, were Jewish too. I would be a supportive husband and father, and a Godian dropout.
In Channa’s efficient way, she got busy. She learned of a Havarah in our town (an informal gathering of Jews for prayer and learning, usually not led by a rabbi). Channa and I began to attend, and Lena and James went to the Sunday school along with a changing population of other young Jewish hopefuls.
One day, Lena brought home a tiny twist of paper from Sunday school, with notes written in her own hand. She asked Channa, “Can we do this on Friday?”
This was to say a prayer, to light candles, to eat a special sort of bread, and to drink a sip of wine. Grape juice would be okay for the children. Very likely, Lena also had with her a recipe for the special bread, called challah, the making of which, with one’s children, would be a fine, ethnic thing to do before the Friday dinner.
I was suspicious about this prayer: What words were creeping into my household? Hmm. Let’s see. The prayer on the paper was written in Hebrew but was conveniently translated into simple English. The prayer was addressed to God, who was identified as the Creator of the Universe. So far, so good. The rest of the prayer thanked Him for the light from the candle and for the bread and the wine.
All right, I thought. I can accept that; no problem. So that Friday night, at supper, for the first time, awkwardly, our family celebrated Shabbat.
Here’s what I, the academic, thought: after all, it is right for my wife and my children to want firmness of identity, and if Jesus isn’t in my personal picture, then there is nothing more glorious and meaningful than the life of a Jew, one of God’s own chosen covenant people, heirs to a tradition of nearly four thousand years, intense students of the Hebrew Bible.
To thank the Creator of the Universe for the gifts of light, and of food, and of drink, I thought, need not offend me, the ex-Godian. But what I did not know on that first Shabbat night is that such prayers would challenge mere ex-Godianity, and that they would win.
Religious ceremonies exert their power on those who live them. Prayers work.
When you pray to God, God notices you. When God notices you, you sense it, and you yearn to please Him more. You yearn to please Him by praying harder, by welcoming Shabbat more intensely, as the bridegroom welcomes the bride (a frequently used Jewish metaphor for the act of welcoming Shabbat). You become more ceremonious in your Shabbat preparation, more thorough, more delighted. You long for Friday evening as you never did before. You study God’s language and find that you are praying in what had been to you a foreign tongue, but is His own.
On Friday evening, everyone knows that table conversation is going to be about God, and about Shabbat, and about why we are thus remembering Him. There will be stories about the past. There will be laughter. That evening, the father and the mother know, their family will be blessed to do what Jewish families have done for centuries, upon centuries, upon centuries, every Friday evening, as the years have rolled along in their diurnal way. And when dinner is over, the children will be tucked into bed, secure in the certainty that they and their family are integral to something greater than themselves, and, by that miracle, that they have identity, that they have purpose, that they are safe.
What I did not understand that first awkward night was that, as Channa and I stumbled through our first Shabbat prayers, God already knew us as the man and the woman He had planned for us to become. Certainly He knew that I would convert to Judaism, though it took His whispered invitation to me during Yom Kippur service a few years later to start that process. He knew that Channa and I would be deep appreciators of His gift to His chosen people, and that we would share that appreciation with our children. God also knew—though it would have astonished us—that more than twenty years later, Channa and I would become joyful acceptors of something else as well.
But first, it was too hot in Connecticut.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
“And there,” I concluded my story, “is the witch’s leg!”
I pulled the car over in Bucksport, Maine, so that Lena and James could stare at the tall granite grave marker on which there is an indelible mark in the shape of a woman’s leg from knee to toe, under the last name of the man who is buried there, Colonel Jonathan Buck.
“The leg! The leg will follow you to your grave!”
This is what was shrieked at Buck by the deformed son of a witch who was burned to death in 1719 under Buck’s authority. As the witch was burning, her lower leg rolled free and lay there before the horrified spectators.
Cursed as a witch and driven from town, living in a hovel with her adult son, nevertheless this woman had been hauled before the town elders when things turned bad for the townspeople. The witch claimed innocence, but someone must have caused the bad times, and who among the town’s population was the obvious culprit?
Burn her they must, and burn her they did.
Later, at his own allotted time, Colonel Buck died, covered with honors and much admired by the town. He was buried in the cemetery. Years later, the town set up a monument in his memory, the very one at which Lena and James were staring. And what do you suppose happened? One day, townspeople saw that a stain in the form of a woman’s leg had appeared on the grave. Horrified, they remembered the curse, and they scrubbed and they scraped and they chipped. But the stain remained!
In fact, the monument has been replaced twice—and the same stain keeps appearing!
My children were thrilled and shivery, all at once. And I was pleased—and Channa grinned at me conspiratorially—because I had kept them amused as I told my unfolding story (with much greater detail than here) during the last hour of the drive toward Undercliff, and I had timed my final line of the story to the very moment when we were abreast the monument itself.
The curtain fell. The wide eyes of my two children were applause enough. Now: only forty minutes to go.
To Undercliff!
We were almost home.
After every dinner at Undercliff, my father settled back in his chair at the end of the dining table, while the rest of us scattered to couches or to rockers or to the floor before the fire. Dad would set the evening’s talk agenda, to get the flow going, by throwing out a provocative question. Dad cared little for any softening verbal caress; with his questions, he was direct and confrontational. Any guest might be challenged by a question unblemished by nuance.
On this particular evening, a few days after our arrival, Dad was challenging a summering lawyer. “You’re a Catholic. How can the Pope be infallible, Craig? How can any man be infallible?”
“Dick, I
don’t know.”
“But that’s what you Catholics say. There’s been a decree, or a bull, or whatever you call it.”
“Well, there needs to be a final authority. . . .”
“But not a man as the authority. It’s absurd.”
“It’s about faith and morals, Dick. When the Pope speaks ex cathedra, he can’t speak falsely. It’s impossible. When speaking ex cathedra, the Pope is imbued by the Holy Ghost, and so—”
“But then he’s not a man!”
“Of course, he’s a man, Dick. What else would he be?”
“Not if he’s imbued with the Holy Spirit. That makes him a god.”
“No it doesn’t. What about the apostles, at Pentecost? They were men. They were imbued. They weren’t gods.”
“When the Holy Spirit is imbuing an apostle,” Dad opined with finality, “he’s not a man at that moment. He’s become some kind of a god.” My father looked around the room, gathering our eyes. “What do you others think?”
Dad found me with his eyes, wanting my support. “Dikkon, you’re the theologian.” Then he turned back to Craig. “But is that really what they teach you? Tell us. You’re off to your church every Sunday.”
Craig laughed; he was a sailor. In summer, when the boats swung to their moorings out front, cruising was the holy activity of any day, be that day Sunday or otherwise. “No church for me. My wife goes.”
“So!” Dad laughed. “You see, you are human, after all! And that’s why you, anyway, can’t be infallible, and that means the Pope can’t be infallible either. The very idea is absurd! Only God is infallible, and He’s not around to let us know all about it. We’re all sinners here under the sun. Devil and angel.” He looked around to see if anyone would pick this up. “Devil and angel, that’s what I say.”
The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told Page 15