Pascale stared. She was dressed in her usual narrow black slacks that hugged her round little derrière, and had on a fuzzy sweater, vividly rose. Her white skin had a faint wash of color from the cold outside, and there was the slash of red over her mouth.
“Here, Azarya. Let me take your coat,” Cass said to break the silence.
“No, it’s okay. I’ll keep it on.”
“But you’re staying here. Make yourself at home!”
Azarya smiled.
“It’s so kind of you both. I hope I’m not putting you out.”
“Are you kidding? This is great! Pascale, if it’s okay with you, I’ll just show Azarya his room and let him get settled. Then I’ll start dinner. Azarya, don’t worry about food. I went to Brookline yesterday and bought everything from a takeout place that’s strictly kosher. I have paper plates, plastic utensils, everything. I got the strictest instructions from my mother, and I followed them to the letter. She even called Cousin Shaindy to make sure that the takeout place met the Valdener standards, but I bought a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables in case you don’t feel completely comfortable, not knowing the place for yourself.”
“Ah, so that is what that food is!” Pascale murmured.
Azarya smiled at her voice. She did have a charming voice, thickly accented, smoky soft.
“Yes. And I threw out all the food that wasn’t kosher, so you don’t have to worry about contamination.”
Azarya laughed, turning red as he did so.
“You didn’t have to go to all that trouble. It’s enough that you let me sleep here.”
“Would our food really contaminate his?” Pascale asked. “This I do not understand. How would the contaminants be transmitted? Like spores in the air?”
“No, I was exaggerating. I just didn’t want anything to get mixed up.”
“It is strange,” Pascale softly observed.
Azarya laughed again, and again you could see the flush creeping along his translucent cheeks. He didn’t look as if he had started shaving. No, of course he hadn’t, or he would have a beard.
His hair had darkened since he was a little boy, at least judging by his payess. They were no longer the color of flax, but of baked whole wheat.
“You sure you don’t want to give me your coat?”
“It’s okay.”
It occurred to Cass that Azarya just wanted to warm up first. He’d probably been freezing, sitting on the porch waiting for them.
“Come, you’ll be staying here on this floor.”
Cass led him into the bedroom that was off the living room.
“It’s private here. There’s your bathroom. Pascale and I are upstairs.”
“It’s good. Much more space than I have in my own home, with all the sisters.”
“How many is it now? Oh, I’m sorry! I’d forgotten.”
“No, no, it’s okay. I have eleven sisters. But the five oldest are already married and have children of their own—so far all of them girls, eight of them!”
“So you’re still the only boy. What are the odds of that?”
“One in 524,288.”
Cass smiled.
“And you still have a prime number of sisters. And your nieces are a perfect cube.”
“You remember that. Amazing.”
“It’s more amazing that you remember. You were only a small boy.”
“But for me, it was a big event. To meet you and Professor Klapper and Miss Margolis. To learn that there were names for things like prime numbers. To learn that I lived in a place called the United States of America.”
“I remember. She drew you a map. Did you really teach yourself to read from that map?”
“It wasn’t so hard. She’d said all the names as she wrote them down, and I remembered them. And I already knew how to read Hebrew and Yiddish and Aramaic, so I had the idea that letters could represent sounds.”
Cass smiled at him. Now that he was looking more closely at Azarya’s face, he could see that the child he remembered was preserved there. The expression was eerily similar, and the wide-spaced eyes, a deep blue almost verging on violet. His features were still delicate, though his face had become thinner, the petal-shape curve of his cheek elongated and flattened. He still looked young enough so that the term that came to mind was “beautiful” rather than “handsome.”
“Come, let’s give you something to eat.”
Azarya took off his coat and hung it in the closet.
“Warmed up now?” Cass asked, and of course Azarya only laughed in response, since to do anything else would be to admit he’d been cold in the first place, which would be to imply that his host and hostess had been remiss in leaving him to fend for himself for four and a half hours. Cass was beginning to catch on.
Azarya took off his felt hat. Under it he had a black velvet skullcap, which he kept on.
They went to the kitchen, and Cass took out the food he’d gotten from Tirza’s Batampte Kitchen—Tirza’s Tasty Kitchen—and started warming the carrot tzimmes and the mushrooms with barley in the microwave, leaving the food in the sealed containers so that, as Pascale had put it, none of the spores could infect it. There was also a large pickled fish that Cass set out on the table in the aluminum pan it had come in.
“Sorry for the inelegance.” He laughed.
“It’s very kind of you to go to all this trouble. I’ll set the table,” Azarya said.
“It’s only these paper plates and plastic knives and forks.”
“Really, I didn’t expect this, or I wouldn’t have bothered you at all.”
“Nonsense. This is such a pleasure for me! Looking at you, I realize how quickly the years have gone. Here, just put them at these three places.” Cass indicated where they’d be sitting at the huge table, with its six oversize chairs. “When do you see Gabriel Sinai?”
“Tomorrow morning at nine.”
“I can drive you over.”
“Oh no, no need. I know the way. I went by Professor Sinai’s office this afternoon, just so I’d know how to get there. It will take me a half hour at the most, now that I know where it is.”
Cass smiled. He was elated. Azarya had had this effect on him when he was a child, and now Cass hadn’t spent more than ten minutes with him and he was already giddy. Why not? The boy was there intact, you could see the child still lurking in his expression. Only by now, at sixteen, his mind must have traveled infinities. Barry Fine certainly thought so, and, according to Barry, Gabriel Sinai, himself one of the best mathematical minds alive, was willing to go all-out to get the boy to MIT. And if that happened, then of course Azarya should live with Cass and Pascale. He was too young to be in a dormitory, and that world would be too disruptive anyway. How could Azarya go from New Walden to coed dorms and friends with benefits? No, it made sense for Azarya to live here with Cass and Pascale, who were his own family and would ease his transition. Cass was already heady on the fantasy.
Cass ran upstairs to Pascale’s study to bring her down for dinner. She was standing at the window that looked out on the park across the street, and turned around at his footstep.
“Is the Jewish food ready?” she asked.
He laughed. “It’s just regular food, really. You won’t be able to taste the difference.”
“It is very strange to me.”
“It’s pretty strange to me, too.”
“Not in the same way. That much is obvious.”
“How do you mean?”
“The obvious meaning. You are Jewish.”
“But not a practicing Jew. Not a believing Jew.”
“Still, it is very different for me. It makes me see you differently, too.”
“Me?”
“I had never thought about it, that you are Jewish. It made no difference. It was not part of my conception.” She pronounced this as a French word.
“Does it make a difference now?”
“It is just that I am seeing it now. I had not even seen it before, and now I wonder how
it is I could not. It is like when I noticed that the Klimt rug in the living room has circles that are ovaries. I had never seen them until I saw them. Now to look at the rug is to see the ovaries.”
Cass felt the elation draining out of him, though it was understandable that Pascale would, at first, think of Azarya as alien, an intergalactic voyager. The whole point of the distinctive hair and clothes was, of course, to keep the Hasidim separate from the outside world. These things were as effective as Cass’s tossing all the unkosher items out of the refrigerator, meant to ensure that no mix-ups occurred. It would be hard for Azarya at MIT if even Pascale was having difficulties seeing past the payess.
They sat down at the table.
“But why do you have the paper and the plastic? Can our plates also infect his food? You did not throw out all our dinnerware, I hope!”
Cass shook his head, the blush on Azarya’s face painful to see. Then, to divert the conversation as quickly as possible, he said to Azarya, “Pas-cale’s father is a mathematician. He’s at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques.”
“Oh, in Bures-sur-Yvette!”
“Ah, you know!” Pascale’s tone was instantaneously warmer.
Azarya smiled.
“Is it okay if I ask who your father is?”
“He is Claude Puissant.”
“The Puissant Manifold?”
“Ah! You know this, too!” This time she raised her glass of Carmel kosher wine at him in a toast. Her eyebrows had interlaced over her nose as she’d studied the label, finally shrugging and taking a cautious sip, grimacing slightly before taking another one.
“I assumed the manifold was named ‘Puissant’ because it’s such a powerful tool.” He smiled self-effacingly. “I have a lot to learn.”
“I am also interested in mathematics. Most especially probability theory, which I reject without qualification.”
Azarya’s smile wavered a little uncertainly.
“I will explain. An event that happens happens. Its non-occurrence, therefore, cannot happen. When something happens, its not happening cannot happen. If it is happening, then it is happening one hundred percent, and it is zero percent that it is not happening. Therefore”—she puffed into the second syllable in her distinctive way—“there is only the absolutely impossible, with the probability of zero, and there is the thing that happens with absolute necessity, so that its probability is complete and infinite. C’est tout.”
The blood rushed to Azarya’s cheeks, and he got a look of panic in his eyes.
“Would you like some wine?” Cass asked him, and Azarya, who had declined any wine before, dumbly nodded yes, and then, not bothering to examine the label as Pascale had done—he must simply have trusted Cass to have obtained kosher wine—took a long sip.
Pascale excused herself early from dinner, carrying another glass of the Carmel with her upstairs. Cass poured the rest of the bottle into Azarya’s glass.
“Pascale is a poet,” Cass said.
“A poet,” Azarya said. “I never met a poet before.” He smiled. “She’s how I would have pictured a poet She’s very … poetic.”
“Maybe sometimes a little … imprecise.”
“Poetic license.” Azarya laughed.
Cass wondered whether Azarya realized that Pascale wasn’t Jewish. It was hard to gauge how worldly Azarya was, but for him even to know a phrase like ‘poetic license’ showed that he was reading. He was obviously less of a stickler for the Law than the other Valdeners—at the very least, he didn’t count counting people as a transgression. The question that was quivering on Cass’s lips was what the Valdener Rebbe thought of his son’s venture into the outside world. Was this sojourn to Cambridge an act of rebellion? As if reading the unspoken question, Azarya brought up his father.
“My father sends you his greetings. He says that it’s more than long enough between your last visit and your next.”
“How is he?”
“How is he? I am wondering that myself. The whole time on the bus, walking around Cambridge, even sitting here at dinner with you and Pas-cale, I am asking myself how he is.”
There was quiet in the room. Cass sighed, and Azarya answered him with another sigh, staring down at the tzimmes on his plate.
“I’m thinking about my mother,” Cass said. “I’d never really asked her too much about her leaving New Walden. She just told me recently that it had been hard for her.”
“Your mother is my angel. Remember when Miss Margolis—”
“I think you should call her Roz. If I know her, and I do, she’d be offended to hear you calling her ‘Miss Margolis.’”
Azarya smiled.
“Yes, I like that. Roz had said I was her angel. I thought that was the best joke I had heard in my life. But now that’s how I think of your mother. She’s my angel.”
Cass smiled.
“She’s a wonderful mother to me and Jesse.”
“And a second wonderful mother to me. In many ways, I’m closer to her than to my own mother. Your mother sends me books, journals, tapes of Bach, Mozart.”
“You like music?”
“Very much.”
“Do you play an instrument?”
“Not to speak of. I listen.”
Azarya cast his deep-blue eyes in the direction of the baby grand.
“Do you play?”
“Like you, I listen. Pascale plays, though not often enough. But if you like, we could listen to the stereo now. Come take a look at my CDs while I clean up.”
“I’ll help you first.”
“There’s really nothing to do here. There’s something to be said for eating on disposable plates.”
They tossed the remains, and then Cass showed Azarya his CD collection, which he examined at length. He chose Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and the two of them settled down on the couch and melted into the music. And when the last measure was played, Azarya asked if they could listen to it again.
XXVIII
The Argument from the Mandelbaum Equilibrium
This time, when the phone rings at 2 a.m., Cass is certain that his desperate plea for help preparing for the Fidley debate has been answered at last, but once again he’s wrong. For the third time in the last seven hours, it’s Lucinda.
“Lucinda!”
“Are you up? Did I wake you?”
“No, you didn’t wake me. I don’t seem to be sleeping much since you went away.”
“Well, I’ll be home tomorrow.”
“And don’t forget I’m picking you up at Logan.”
“I really could take a cab. Pappa’s picking up all expenses.”
“No, I want to come get you.”
“But that’s double the driving time. You’ll have to drive to Logan and then drive back.” She doesn’t have much confidence in Cass’s mathematical abilities, and he laughs.
“Don’t worry about it. And if I’m a few minutes late, don’t assume I’m not coming. I have that debate with Fidley tomorrow—well, actually today. It should end in plenty of time for me to get to Logan, but give me a few minutes, just in case.”
“Debate with Fidley?”
“Felix Fidley.”
“Oh, right. I remember. Tell me again what you’re debating him on?”
“God. The existence of God.”
“Right. I still can’t believe that Felix Fidley wants to argue for religion. It’s just a way for him to show off his brilliance, to take a far-out position and then overwhelm everybody with the way he can make it sound persuasive.”
“I hope he doesn’t overwhelm me.”
“I hope not, too.”
“Hey, can I get a little more encouragement going here?”
“You know this stuff inside and out. There’s nothing Fidley can pull on you. I have absolute confidence.”
“My girl,” he says gratefully.
“I’m sorry that I’ve been calling you so much today,” Lucinda says, changing the subject. “I’m being something
of a nuisance.”
“You never have to apologize for calling me. Call me three times, thirty times, three hundred times a day.”
“I’m still worried that maybe you didn’t get my joke about being for yourself as the core of Jewish ethics. That you still think I was actually being serious.”
“Lucinda.” He’s moved that she cares so much what he thinks about her. “Don’t you think I know your sense of humor by now?” He’s not only moved; he is, he now has to admit, relieved that he can eliminate any nagging, disloyal doubt.
“Oh, good. Well, I better let you get some sleep if you’re going to fang Felix Fidley tomorrow.”
“Good night, Lucinda. Sleep well.”
“Good night, Cass. You sleep well, too. I love you.”
XXIX
The Argument from Rigid Designators
Cass came down the next morning at seven, still wet from his shower, anxious that Azarya be on time for his appointment with Gabriel Sinai. He wanted the boy to have a good breakfast, too. The door to the spare bedroom was open. Cass walked over to it and saw that the bed was neatly made. In the bathroom, the bath towel was still damp from the boy’s shower. But he was gone, no signs of his having had a glass of juice or milk. Cass imagined that either Azarya wanted to get out before Pascale and Cass woke up so that he wouldn’t get in their way, or that he was too excited to stay put.
Cass was disappointed. He had woken eager to come down and talk to Azarya. He’d given him a key to the house so he wouldn’t have to worry about the boy’s having to wander around until somebody got home.
Azarya called Cass at his office during the day to say that Professor Sinai wanted to take him to the Harvard Hillel that night for dinner, and would that be okay? Cass assured him it would be, but again was disappointed—stupidly, of course, since Azarya had come here to spend time not with Cass and Pascale but with Professor Sinai.
Azarya had asked Cass whether there was a time by which he ought to be home, and Cass had said no, he should feel free to come and go as he wanted. That’s why he had given him the key.
“But you have to be careful. Not all parts of Cambridge are safe. It’s not like New Walden.”
36 Arguments for the Existence of God Page 30