36 Arguments for the Existence of God

by Rebecca Goldstein

  “I don’t know. He’s got a lot of contenders.”

  Cass was staring at Roz.

  “What is it, Cass? Do I still have shampoo in my hair?”

  He stooped down swiftly to one knee.

  “I love you, Suwäayaiwä!”

  “Well, I love you, too!”

  She followed suit and got down on one knee in her purple towel.

  “No, no. You have to stand, and I have to kneel!”

  “Okay.” She got back up. “What are we playing?”

  “We’re not. I’m proposing.”

  “What are you proposing?”

  “Marry me! Marry me and become Suwäayaiwä Seltzer.”

  “Good one!” She laughed. “No, wait a minute! You mean it! Darling boy, get up. You’re upsetting me down there.”

  He got up. She put her hand on his cheek.

  “I can’t marry you, Cass.”

  “Never? I know I’m young, but I’m getting older quick.”

  “Cass, I can’t think about marriage, and you’re only thinking about it because you’re having a breakdown and haven’t realized it yet.”

  “I don’t think I’m having a breakdown. I think I’m realizing that you’re the most perfect woman in the world.”

  “Well, of course I am.” She gently stroked his hair. The tender gesture made her feel even more impossibly tender. “I’ll always be there for you, but I need a life of maximal options.”

  “Don’t you think you could live with maximal options married to me?”

  “I have all kinds of things I need to do with my life. You do, too, only you don’t know what they are yet. Don’t look so woebegone! You’re going to have a lot more loves in your life.”

  “That’s supposed to cheer me up?”

  “You know what you’re doing, don’t you?”

  “I’m asking you to marry me.”

  “You’re trying to replace your infatuation with Jonas Elijah Klapper with an infatuation with me. You’re trying to do it so quickly that the loss won’t register on your mind. It’s a rebound reflex.”

  “That’s not what love is.”

  “Okay, I’m game. What’s love?”

  “Love is this. It’s real. It’s not infatuation or bewitchment or enchantment. It’s the splendor that’s still there after the disenchantment of the world.”

  If they got married, they would be able to tell their children that he had proposed to their mother while she was wearing a purple towel. It was the purple towel that gave him hope as he waited for her to break her long silence.

  XXVII

  The Argument from the Bones of the Dead

  Cass was grateful—and surprised—when Pascale remembered to scrawl him a note and leave it where he would be certain to see it, telling him that his mother had called.

  “Deb. Call. Urgent.”

  She had put it on a front burner of the kitchen stove. Of course he would be certain to notice it when he came home from work to start dinner, as he did every night except when they ate out. The symbolism was perfect, worthy of Pascale, whose every gesture was touched by her poetry. Was she aware of the English idiom “putting something on the back burner”? Was there a similar expression in French? Cass’s colloquial French wasn’t good enough for him to know. It would be like her, though, the poetic economy and compression that wrapped the message in metaphor.

  Still, his stomach lurched at the three words. His mother’s tone must have been truly urgent to break through the heavy fog of Pascale’s poetic distractions. He was almost sure the urgency had something to do with Jesse. There was no reason to think that Jesse had collided with disaster, unless one considered as a reason Jesse’s whole history, the reckless belief in his ability to push past the limits of the strictly moral, not to speak of the legal, and assume that he’d get away with it.

  Things had been going well for Cass’s little brother for the last two years. He was working on Wall Street, for a firm called New Empire Reinvestment Opportunities, and he had soared to the top. He was living largely and glamorously. His girlfriends were supermodels, his apartment in SoHo so fabulous that Woody Allen had used it to film one of his movies, paying him twenty thousand dollars a day, which was chump change, Jesse said, but he’d agreed to it because it was so cool.

  All of this made his mother nervous. Cass could tell because when she spoke about Jesse she only quoted him and never added her own commentary—as if she was willing herself to believe no more and no less than what he was telling her. It didn’t reassure her that the acronym for Jesse’s firm was NERO.

  But the phone call had nothing to do with Jesse. It was Azarya Sheiner that his mother was worrying about.

  “Things have reached a crisis state. He wants to leave. He doesn’t feel he can do anything else. He needs to go to a university. He needs to meet mathematicians.”

  “He must be going through hell.”

  “If it was hard for me, I can only begin to imagine what it’s like for him.”

  “What do you think we can do for him?”

  “That’s why I’m calling you. You know he’s been corresponding with that professor at MIT.”

  “Gabriel Sinai.”

  “Right. Gabriel Sinai. Seems like a lovely man.”

  “He does.”

  In the past few years, his mother had had more contact with the town where she’d grown up, America’s only shtetl, but only because of Azarya. It was because of Azarya that she’d overcome her aversion and reconnected with her extended family and with the Rebbe. Cass had enlisted her help ten years ago, in her capacity as a school psychologist, when he and Roz had realized the nature of the Rebbe’s son.

  Three years ago, Azarya had turned thirteen, the age that marks the end of childhood for an observant Jewish male.

  Cass hadn’t been able to go to Azarya’s Bar Mitzvah, since he couldn’t very well take Pascale to New Walden—it would have been overwhelming for her—and he hadn’t wanted to leave her at home. In fact, he hadn’t seen Azarya in years. It was his mother who kept him up to date. The festivities for Azarya’s Bar Mitzvah had lasted an entire week, with all of New Walden, as well as many Hasidim from other sects, participating. Azarya’s birthday was in May, and the streets of New Walden had overflowed with celebration, the Valdeners dancing beneath the lilacs.

  His mother had gone to the opening event. She’d planned to go to more, arranging to stay over with her cousin Shaindy for the Shabbes that would crown the tumult, but realized that she couldn’t take any more of it, not even for Azarya’s sake. And she couldn’t get close to him anyway, claustrated as she was in the curtained-off women’s section. The event she had attended had begun with the Rebbe and Azarya handing out awards to Valdener students who had excelled in special examinations that had been given in honor of the Bar Mitzvah. Each of the children came up to the dais, where the Rebbe and his son stood, and picked up a plastic cup of grape juice, whose contents had been mingled with a cup from which the Rebbe himself had sipped, toasted l’chaim—to life— and then received a holy book, the difficulty of which varied with the student’s age.

  After that the Rebbe had made a long speech recounting the saga of the Valdener Hasidim, the story of one sect but also of one family, going back from the Bar Mitzvah boy to his father, the present Valdener Rebbe, to Azarya’s grandfather, who had brought a portion of his followers over to America in time to escape Hitler, though many had perished, and past that time to the other rebbes, fathers and sons with the occasional son-in law, ending finally back at the root of it all, the Ba’al Shem Tov himself. The story of the Rebbe’s family was the story of the Valdeners, which was the story of Hasidism, which was the story of the Jews. Azarya’s becoming a Bar Mitzvah was a triumph in a long, unlikely tale of survival.

  The Rebbe had spoken of the vision of the prophet Ezekiel—Yechezkel in Hebrew. “The King of Babylonia, Nebuchadnezzar, threw Chananya, Mishael, and Azarya into the fiery furnace, and at the same time the Holy One, blessed b
e He, said to Yechezkel, ‘Go and restore the dead in the valley of Dura.’ And those bones came and slapped Nebuchadnezzar in the face!

  “There is no resurrection of the dead greater than this! Our valley of Dura is the Hudson Valley. Here stands Azarya, a Bar Mitzvah! Azarya the Rav lives! Azarya ha-Rav chai! Azarya the holy one lives! Azarya ha-kodesh chai! The gematria adds up to 719. And the gematria of the sentence describing how Yechezkel breathed life into the dry bones is also 719! Vatevo ba hem ha-ruach vi-yichiyu. And the breath came into them, and they lived!”

  Cass and his mother’s Bar Mitzvah present to Azarya had been a subscription to Annals of Mathematics. Cass had consulted a mathematician at Frankfurter, Barry Fine, as to which mathematics journal to order. Barry had shown an interest in the story of the Hasidic boy with the unusual mathematical gifts, and he’d told Cass that if Azarya wanted he could write to him. Azarya did, and Barry and he were still corresponding. But at a certain point, Barry had suggested that Azarya needed a better mathematician than himself and had gotten in touch with Gabriel Sinai. Not only was Gabriel a legend, but he had also been a child prodigy, back in Augusta, Georgia. And he was also an Orthodox Jew, although with nothing like the insularity of the Valdeners. He’d become observant when he was an undergraduate at Harvard and, feeling lost on campus, had started eating his meals at the Harvard Hillel, liking the crowd he’d found there. Their lives were more ordered and restrained than the bacchanalia in his dorm, and he had felt comfortable. He liked that the religion was more about deed than creed. If you stopped eating Kraft cheese because you worried that the rennet from the stomach of an animal was the ingredient used to solidify the milk, you were a good Jew, whether you believed in God or not. Judaism was behaviorist. Carry out the behavior and the beliefs would take care of themselves. Or not. This seemed a sensible religion to Gabriel, a religion that freed you from having to waste brainpower on the mundane choices of your physical existence but didn’t bother you too much about your beliefs. And he continued to take his meals at the Harvard Hillel, which was as convenient as it was congenial, since at forty-one he still wasn’t married.

  He had also found a certain solace in the idea of a day of rest. He liked to think that the 14.3 percent of the week in which he was conserving his mathematical activity might extend his productivity a few more years. Like many in his profession, Gabriel was sensitive about the premature senescence that hangs above the heads of mathematicians like the sword of Damocles. The Fields Medal, the highest accolade in mathematics, is restricted to mathematicians forty or younger, and many will tell you that’s because if a mathematician hasn’t produced remarkable work by then, then he is never going to do it. The medal isn’t given for a single result but for a body of work, which makes the age restriction all the more telling.

  Gabriel had won his Fields Medal at the age of thirty-one, and among the theorems that had gotten him the math world’s equivalent of a Nobel was a result concerning prime numbers, which had fascinated him since his days as a prodigy. For centuries, mathematicians have tried to find patterns in the way the prime numbers are distributed among the whole numbers. Is there, in that infinite sequence of primes, a stretch that is as long as you like and in which the difference between each prime number and its successor in the stretch is always the same number n? Mathematicians had long suspected there was, and Gabriel had proved a theorem that showed that their intuition was correct.

  “Sinai wants Azarya to come to MIT to meet with him,” Cass’s mother continued. “He’s prepared to sponsor him, or whatever the term is, to get him into MIT, even though he doesn’t have any of the conventional qualifications.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” said Cass. “He got a perfect 1600 on his SATs.”

  Cass’s mother had used her connections as a school psychologist to arrange for Azarya to take the standardized exams.

  “True. Even though your old girlfriend Roz was worried when she met him that he’d never learn to read.”

  “So what does Azarya think about Sinai’s plan?”

  “He’s excited. He wants to come up as soon as possible.”

  “He’s told his father?”

  “You know Azarya.”

  “So how’d the Rebbe take it?”

  “That I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

  There was a heavy silence on both ends.

  “He’ll stay with us, of course.”

  “Of course. But maybe you should check with Pascale.”

  “I know it will be okay with her. She loves mathematicians. She grew up with them. And you know how kind she is.”

  “I think you should check with her anyway.”

  Cass found Pascale perfectly amenable when he told her. He explained that Azarya Sheiner was a sixteen-year-old prodigy, and that he would be spending a few days at MIT. “It will be better if he stays with us rather than at a hotel.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s a stranger in the world.”

  “All mathematicians are strangers in the world.”

  “He’s especially a stranger, even for a mathematician. He comes from an insular background, very religious.”

  “Jewish?”

  “Yes. In fact, he’s a distant cousin on my mother’s side.”

  “I’ve never met a religious Jew. It will be interesting for me.”

  “You’ll like him. He’s amazing.”

  “Perhaps yes, perhaps no. It is annoying for one person to command another to like someone.”

  “It was more of a prediction.”

  “That is even more annoying.”

  There was a flurry of telephone conversations between Cass and his mother. Azarya would take a New Walden Kosher bus to the Port Authority Terminal in New York, then a Greyhound to South Station in Boston. From there, the Red Line on the T would take him to Porter Square, and he could walk from there to Cass’s house. Cass would get back from Frankfurter as soon as possible, but Pascale would be there to let him in.

  Unfortunately, Cass wasn’t able to leave his office as early as he’d planned, and on the drive home he worried about how Pascale and Azarya had interacted. They were both strangers in the world, which meant that they might hit it off fantastically, though also might not.

  Cass drove back from Frankfurter fast, even through the speed traps that separated Weedham from Cambridge. It was true that Pascale was an extraordinarily kind person—he’d seen her hand over a sandwich she’d just bought at Au Bon Pain to a homeless man haranguing the passersby of Harvard Square—but the thick smoke of distractions in which she lived often obscured her vision of anything outside it, and sometimes her obliviousness could result in unintended rudeness. And she was right that a person couldn’t predict whom she’d like and whom she wouldn’t.

  Pascale had taken an instant dislike to Roz when she had visited, to the extent that she had not sat down with them at the table when they ate, instead taking a tray with bread and cheese and fruit up to her study. Cass knew that Roz could come on strong and was an acquired taste, but he hadn’t understood what Roz had done that was so objectionable. Something must have passed between them that he hadn’t seen, and he suspected it must have been Roz’s fault. Were he to list Pascale’s attributes, he would put kindness first, even before her poetic passion and brilliance, her fierce and fragile beauty, that ethereality that was such a part of her essence that its scent emanated from her hair.

  When Cass pulled up, he was surprised to see Azarya sitting on the steps with a suitcase next to him. It had to be Azarya, even though Cass would not have recognized him, because what other Hasid would be sitting on his front steps? Azarya stood as Cass got out of the car, and smiled, coming down the stairs to meet him at the front gate.

  Azarya probably wouldn’t grow to be a tall man, though who knew? At sixteen, he could still shoot up. Cass had been one of the smaller kids in his class until around Azarya’s age, though he’d had unusually big hands and feet, and his mother had predicted he would grow into them. Azar
ya was reaching out to shake his hand, and Cass’s big mitt enfolded it completely.

  “Azarya! At long last! But what are you doing out here? It’s cold!”

  It was mid-March and still wintry, especially at this hour, the sun having disappeared over the horizon.

  “I was waiting for you.”

  “But why out here?”

  Azarya smiled with a shrug.

  Cass suddenly recalled the complicated Jewish laws about a man being alone with a woman who was not his wife. How stupid of him to have forgotten! Of course, he wasn’t sure what he could have done about it anyway. He couldn’t very well have ordered Pascale not to be in her own house when Azarya arrived, while leaving the key with a neighbor.

  “Come on in. Let’s warm you up.”

  But when Cass got inside the house, it was dark and empty.

  “Where’s Pascale?” he asked Azarya.

  Again Azarya smiled and shrugged.

  “You were sitting out there because there was nobody home?”

  “I didn’t sit here the whole time. I walked around. I saw Harvard. I walked to MIT. It was good.”

  “What did you do with your suitcase?”

  “I carried it.”

  Cass smiled, a bit confused. Should he start worrying about Pascale? They had only the one car, so she couldn’t have gotten into an accident, but she could have been hit crossing a street, or been a hostage in a bank robbery, tied up in the vault, her small hands helplessly trussed. Before he could get going, he heard the key in the door, and Pascale was running up the front stairs as swift and light as a child, wiggling out of her black sheepskin coat, and hanging it in the hall closet.

  She came into the living room and stopped short, looking from her husband to the strange young man standing next to him. She had seen pictures of people who looked like this, but she was shocked to see one in her own house.

  “Pascale,” Cass said. “This is Azarya. Azarya, Pascale.”

  Fortunately, Pascale was not in the habit of extending her hand at introductions. Cass didn’t know how Azarya would have handled that. He was, of course, not allowed to touch a woman.