“How I came by the knowledge remains to this day shrouded in mystery,” he whispered to Miriam.
Also mysterious was how everything about his cramped Columbia office had been preserved, right down to the spiky plant on the windowsill, which had been dead for years. The very arrangement of the clutter on Professor Klapper’s desk was duplicated, with space cleared for the photograph of his mother in its ornate silver frame. The wooden-slatted chair into which he was poured was either an exact replica of what he’d had at Columbia or had been transported along with the desiccated crown of thorns.
There were times when a student, sequestered with the professor, would encounter him in a rare mood of confidentiality, as if Jonas Elijah Klapper were suddenly made aware of the loneliness of his loftiness, grown weary of the constant burden of delivering himself ex cathedra. The realization would leave him eager to talk as others do, personally and intimately. The identity of the student was inconsequential. One simply had to be there when the mood struck, and today was Cass’s lucky day.
“I am not a preterist—that is, one whose chief interest and delight are in the past. As must anyone who regards with seriousness the es-chatological idea that scaffolds the strata of the greater metaphysics, I point my face resolutely toward the future. And yet the past—I speak here of the personal past—has a power over the present. The past haunts the present with the taunt of what is gone. As Tennyson so irrefutably put it, ‘And Time, a maniac scattering dust, / And Life, a Fury slinging flame.’”
The last line was whispered in a voice so tremulous and faint that Cass wasn’t certain whether the last word was “flame” or “fame.”
Cass was here, by appointment, to plot the course of his study for the next few years. Professor Klapper was insistent that his graduate students not be required to take any of their courses in other Frankfurter departments. Indeed, he strongly warned against it. But since he was the solitary professor in the Department of Faith, Literature, and Values, and since he taught only one seminar a semester, the professor’s position had presented the dean of graduate students with a technical problem—to wit, how are the students in this department to fulfill the course requirements for the Ph.D.? The problem for now related only to Cass Seltzer, since the other Klapper students had long ago fulfilled their course requirements. The plan arrived at was that there would be an extensive syllabus, still to be constructed, that would cover all the best that had been written regarding faith, literature, and values. Cass had already embarked on faith. Professor Klapper had assigned him The Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith. Cass had no idea why.
But today the snow was falling on the campus outside and making all seem hushed and transformed, eerily reminding one, as in the distortions of dreams, of something that turns out to be simply itself; and Jonas Elijah Klapper had forgotten all about matters of syllabi. He was in a reminiscent frame of mind, full of mourning for all the lost paradises, which are, as Proust has so indispensably reminded us, the only paradises that there are.
It was a Friday, and the haunting taunt was of the many years of congenial Fridays that Jonas Elijah Klapper had passed among the select society that would meet in the hidden mews near Washington Square Park, behind the heavy green door of NYU’s Deutsches Haus. This was where the elected members of the New York Institute of the Humanities attended talks by the crème de la creamy New York intelligentsia, preceded by greasy food and even greasier gossip. How he had loved to dish with Susan Sontag.
“Did you know that she was born Susan Rosenblatt?” Jonas Elijah Klapper had confided, mashing his chin down toward his chest, so that his jowls fanned out like an Elizabethan ruff. “Yes, Susan Rosenblatt,” he continued. “‘Sontag’ was the name of her mother’s second husband. She did not like the new dad on the scene, but even at the tender age of twelve she was exquisitely attuned to the tyrannical demands of literary ambition.”
Cass nodded.
“Which brings to mind another fearless female riding bareback on the bucking beast of ambition, the estimable Laura Reichenthal. Oh, do not look so stricken, Mr. Seltzer! I do not expect you to be familiar with that name. However, I would be very much surprised to learn that you’d not heard of Laura Riding”—Cass hadn’t—“the poetess paramour of the superior poet Robert Graves, and enmeshed in the conception of his authentically brilliant White Goddess, in which he wrote these words, which I quote from Appendix B: ‘Do I think that poets are literally inspired by the White Goddess? That is an improper question. What would you think should I ask you if, in your opinion, the Hebrew prophets were literally inspired by God? Whether God is a metaphor or a fact cannot be reasonably argued. Let us likewise be discreet on the subject of the Goddess,’ a subtle point which has not, alas, been influential. Well, let us be discreet, too, regarding the physical description of the Goddess, ‘a lovely slender woman with a hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowanberries, startlingly blue eyes and long fair hair.’ That hooked-nose damsel is Laura Reichenthal, whose first marriage was to a man named, I believe, Gottschalk, which hardly suited, and she simply plucked the name ‘Riding’ from thin air, though I suspect there was metaphor behind it.”
As far as Cass could tell, Professor Klapper was saying that a poet named Laura Reichenthal had changed her name to Laura Riding.
“I adduce one more example to bring it up to the magic three of poetic enchantment: the sad-eyed bon vivant and haut wit of the fabled Algonquin Round Table of the New York literary scene of several decades past. I refer, of course, to Dorothy Parker, who was born Dorothy Rothschild, no relation in the least to the banking-and-finance dynasty, which established branches across Europe and was ennobled by both the Austrians and the British. Dorothy’s family were sans ‘von.’ She married a stockbroker named Edwin Pond Parker II and kept him on for barely two years, explaining that she had married him to escape her name.”
There was no escaping the suggestion that Professor Klapper’s chosen subject, for the moment, seemed to be name-changing.
“It is not ethnicity per se, you understand,” Professor Klapper said, as if reading Cass’s mind. “Consider, for example, the writer, both original and soporific, Gertrude Stein. Hers is a name that requires no more. It is, in its own way, perfect, as is that of the mustachioed Alice B. Toklas. But this is not always so, and there is no shame in availing oneself of remedial renaming. If a motion-picture hussy, whose vocabulary ceased developing long before her bosom, can avail herself of cognominal improvements, why not we who are the very stuff of words? That avatar of self that bears the full weight of one’s reputation, that transcendental signifier by which one sallies forth into the world even when one’s self is not present, is none other than one’s name. Would you permit me to be rather more direct?”
Cass nodded.
“Your name.”
“My name?”
“Yes, I wonder if it isn’t too … effervescent.”
“Effervescent?”
“Indeed. I have to confess that I myself had a good chuckle when I first came upon it on the class roster.”
Something odd was happening to Jonas Elijah Klapper’s face. His muscles were seizing up in violent spasms, his contorted cheeks were stained with tears. Cass became frightened until the sounds escaping from his everted mouth revealed that Jonas Elijah Klapper was laughing.
“Oh, I am sorry! I have a wicked sense of humor! But you do catch the gist of what it is I am saying? If even I cannot contain my merriment at your fizzing appellation, then what can we expect of others? Have you considered, Mr. Seltzer, the possibility of adapting it?”
“No.” Cass didn’t know what his precise emotion was, but he could feel the fire under his skin.
“I submit you think upon it. You might, for example, take Cass as your last name.”
“Then what would my first name be?”
“Do you have, perchance, a Hebrew name?”
“Chaim.”
Jonas Elijah Klapper opened his eyes very wide.
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“Were you aware of its meaning?”
“Life, isn’t it?”
“‘Lives.’ Its gematria value is thirty-six, which is twice eighteen, which is the gematriac value for ‘life.’ Thirty-six is of a hiddenness that sustains existence.”
Cass knew that the letters in the Hebrew word chai, meaning “life,” could also be read as the number eighteen, which is why Jews often write Bar Mitzvah gift checks in multiples of eighteen. But beyond that he didn’t know what Professor Klapper was talking about. He would ask Gideon.
“And yet, for all that, ‘Chaim Cass’ is not quite right. What, might I ask, was your mother’s maiden name?”
“Sheiner.”
“Better, but not much.”
Klapper leaned back into his slatted chair. It had a thick green cushion on it. Cass stole a glance at the photograph of the professor’s mother, who had been named, Cass now had every reason to believe, Hannah Klepfish.
“I have it!” Klapper announced. Was his adviser about to baptize him? “I know where it was that I’ve heard that name Sheiner before. The name of Sheiner is ablaze with majestic luster. It is the dynastic name of the Chief Rabbi of the Valdener Hasidim, a small sect whose leader can trace his lineage back to the inflamed visionary who channeled the Kabbalism of Isaac Luria, the sixteenth-century lion of esoteric Judaism also known as the Arizal, into a more accessible populist venue, and who became the founder of the single most important religious revision in Judaism, by which I mean Hasidism. Hasidism grew into a mass reaction against the abuses of the Pharisaic normative tradition. There are a plurality of Ha-sidic sects, each led by its own charismatic Grand Rabbi—or Rebbe, as he is wont to be called. I refer, of course, to Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the holy Ba’al Shem Tov or Master of the Good Name, also abbreviated into the appellation the Besht, back to whom all Hasidic sects trace themselves. The Ba’al Shem Tov’s past is shrouded in legend, as befits a legendary figure of his proportions, but he was most likely born in 1700, and in the small Ukrainian village of Okop. He was an orphan, who dressed and comported himself like an ignorant peasant while he went off to the forests to commune with cosmic forces. Nobody guessed his singular holiness. He finally revealed himself to the world when he was thirty-six. Had you any idea?”
Of which aspect of the preceding sequence was his adviser asking had he any idea? Cass opted for the concrete.
“Well, yes. My mother was born into a Valdener family. She’s related to the Valdener Rebbe. I used to visit New Walden as a child.”
Jonas Elijah Klapper shot forward in his chair so that he was half hanging off it. His facial expressions sometimes mimicked a silent-film actor. At this moment, you could almost hear Cecil B. DeMille shouting through his horn, “Show us amazement!”
“So, then, you, too, can trace your lineage back to the holy Ba’al Shem Tov?”
“Well, yes, I guess I can. I never really thought about it.”
“Never really thought about it?”
Jonas Elijah Klapper collapsed back into his chair, his outburst knocking the stuffing out of him.
But he soon recovered. He sat up and, turning his back to Cass, put his elbows on his desk and buried his face in his palms. Cass sat there in an agony of uncertainty. Anything at all could be happening now. One guess was as good as the next. Minutes passed. Should he quietly exit? Had Jonas Elijah Klapper already excused him and gone back to work? Cass knew from the others that this sometimes happened.
“Well, this is extraordinary,” Professor Klapper finally said, turning around in his revolving chair and again facing Cass. “This is something I could never have foreseen.”
Jonas Elijah Klapper was gazing at Cass with discomfiting intensity, as if searching in Cass Seltzer’s amiable though distressed visage for signs of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s lingering presence. Cass was forced to stare straight back into the professor’s face, and at close range.
It was, for some obscure reason, excruciatingly uncomfortable to be this physically close to Jonas Elijah Klapper. Not even he was Pure Spirit. The soaring sentences were punctuated by panting intakes of air. The thighs, encased in gray broadcloth, seemed like items better described in the vocabulary of architecture than of anatomy. His face, too, was markedly corporeal—heavy and fleshy. The cultivated elegance of his mind had done what it could, but when he spoke of “the divine pathos,” “the inconsolable solitude,” “the fraught distance between the poet and reader,” he never managed to look more pathetic, inconsolable, or fraught than the man behind the deli counter. But his eyes were sad. There was a depth of sadness in his eyes.
“I have a great interest in meeting the Valdener Rebbe, a man who I suspect confounds that prejudice which sees no worldly knowledge in the Hasidim. As you, of course, are intimately aware, my dear Mr. Seltzer—or may I call you Reb Chaim?—the Grand Rabbi of the Valdeners named the seat of his New World rabbinical court New Walden, presumably alluding to the American transcendentalism of our own homegrown seers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.”
That wasn’t the way Cass’s mother told the story, but Cass wasn’t about to argue with Professor Klapper’s superior erudition.
“We shall seize this extraordinary expedient posthaste! Reb Chaim, I count on you to make the necessary arrangements!”
XII
The Argument from Prime Numbers
They rode to New Walden in a Lincoln Continental.
It had been Roz who had gone to the streamered lot in Somerville and rented the car on Klapper’s—or, rather, Frankfurter’s—dime. Jonas Elijah Klapper had never learned to drive, so a chauffeur was needed, or so Roz kept insisting to Cass.
“But I know how to drive.”
“Tell him your license has expired! I’m not missing this!”
Professor Klapper had seemed a bit put out to learn that an unknown female would be accompanying them, but his attitude toward Cass had undergone so steep an upgrade since he’d learned of Cass’s Valdener connections that he had refrained from too vigorous a protest.
After Professor Klapper had settled himself into the front passenger seat, he turned and examined the driver at length, peering at her over the top of his bifocals.
“I presume from your coiffure that you are an adherent of Rastafarianism. I can assure you that I accord your belief system the same respect I do all religions. I believe it to be a prejudice of temporalism, akin to racism and sexism, when a religion is dismissed on the grounds that it has been established at a time too near the present. Indeed, all religions emerged at some present or other. So let me hasten to declare that you will find nothing but deference on my part for your faith that Haile Selassie is the Messiah.”
Cass braced himself for Roz’s reaction, which, if they were lucky, would be confined to peals of laughter, but Roz stared straight ahead and remained silent.
Jonas Elijah Klapper, satisfied that he had made his point of view known, turned himself to the activity of getting the seat belt around him and inserted into its buckle. He was struggling with the contraption, and Roz, under normal circumstances, would have offered to help, but she couldn’t risk an utterance that would unblock the swell of laughter that she was forcefully resisting for poor Cass’s sake. At last they heard the click, and Roz wordlessly put the car into gear.
Before they’d gotten very far on the Massachusetts Turnpike, Jonas Elijah Klapper decided that he did, vehemently, object to the Rastafarian’s driving. Either Roz normally drove like this, or she was enjoying getting a rise out of their passenger. From the back, Cass could see that Professor Klapper was gripping the sides of his seat.
“Which of these contraptions indicates the speed at which we are recklessly hurtling, young lady?”
“Gee, I don’t know. Is there any way to tell our speed, Cass?”
“Now, see here, they have helpfully posted the speed limit at regular intervals— There! There! We just passed another sign with ‘55’ emblazoned upon it! There must be some way to determine th
e rate at which you are hastening us toward our death.”
He leaned over to try to get a look at the dials.
“Don’t do that, Jonas! Never crowd the driver, especially at the rate we’re going!”
“So you admit we are exceeding the limit! I demand that you pull over immediately and cede the steering wheel to Mr. Seltzer!”
“His license is expired! It’s against the law!”
“So is the reckless endangerment of one’s mortally afrighted passengers! I shall defray all costs should Mr. Seltzer be issued a summons.”
“What about the points on his record? What about the hike in his insurance premiums?”
“Gladly shall I compensate for all, young lady! Premiums, tickets, a hush-hush bribe to the stalwart officer in blue if he can be induced to take it! It shall all be worth it to live to see another morrow!”
The professor prevailed. Cass and Roz switched places.
It was a cold but piercingly bright Sunday afternoon in late February. As they crossed the Hudson River on the Tappan Zee Bridge, the skyline of Manhattan rose up in all its glory.
“It isn’t far now,” Cass announced. He found himself excited to be returning after all these years.
His mother had been amazed when he’d told her about the field trip he was taking. He had called her, at Professor Klapper’s urging, to find out how they should get in touch with the Rebbe to arrange for a personal visit.
“My cousin Henoch,” Deb had answered. “He’s the Rebbe’s gabbai, or personal assistant. It all goes through Cousin Henoch.”
“Do you have Cousin Henoch’s phone number?”
“I’ll get it from Shaindy.” Shaindy, another of Deb’s countless cousins, was the only one in the family with whom Deb remained in contact. Deb’s family had been unusual in New Walden, since Deb had no brothers and sisters, prompting her to fantasize that whatever had prevented her parents from being maximally fruitful had prevented them from having any children at all. The fact that she looked so much like her father, Mendel Sheiner, who had been a bookkeeper in a jewelry exchange in Manhattan’s Diamond District, didn’t count conclusively against her fantasy. A lot of the Valdeners resembled each other. The Rebbe may have decided to redistribute the wealth, taking from a family with lots of children to give to a sterile couple. Anyway, it was a fantasy.
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