by Howard Fast
“Probably not. Why should questions be answered? Except for questions that aren’t asked. Give me your hand, David.” She put his hand between both of hers. “I reach out to you and find God.” He shook his head and she smiled with calm satisfaction. “You’ve passed the magic to me. I know things that you don’t know, David. This is the first time I have been without fear in months and months.”
“My dear, darling Sarah,” David said, “we’ve known each other a few hours, and each of us has his own hunger and need. At this moment, we feel very close, but we’re strangers.”
“No, we’re not strangers.”
“I could love you so easily, but I can’t,” David said miserably. “You know that nothing can come of this.”
“Something already has.”
“We’ll sit here another half-hour,” David said, “and then we’ll get into our separate cars and drive home.”
“Yes. And not interrupt or shatter our contrived lives, and hang on to this moment. ‘The shade by which my life was crost, which makes a desert in the mind, has made me kindly with my kind, and like to him whose sight is lost.’ I picked that up far back, back before college, David. There are scraps of poetry that define lives, and I guess I picked that one because of its proper definition. You know, I don’t really think I’m ugly. Well, I do and I don’t, and enough men have told me how beautiful I am to shake my conviction. But one way or another, how does it help me, David? I chatter like this because my mind chatters.”
“The fear will go away,” David said gently.
“It has — for tonight.”
“You’ll have no problems with your husband?”
“He’ll be in a stupor, if he gets home at all tonight.”
Outside, the cold, clean air of early fall made them press close to each other, and at the cars, David took her in his arms, and both clung to each other in a kind of awful desperation.
“Drive carefully,” he whispered.
She kissed him, and again they embraced, and then she got into her car and drove away. She was driving a Mercedes. It was 1951, only six years after the end of the Holocaust. It couldn’t have any meaning for her, he told himself, but it increased his feeling of guilt. The romantic glow of the evening began to fade, and as he drove home, it faded even more. He had taken advantage of a troubled, neurotic woman who had reached out desperately for help. It would be assuaging his conscience to imagine that this was one of those wonderful, fatefully appointed love affairs that one reads about in romantic novels, but the brutal fact of the matter was that just about this time Lucy might be singing softly to another Sarah, who had awakened from her sleep. He tried to balance things: How did he feel about Lucy, his wife, and how did he feel about this tortured, beautiful woman called Sarah, whom he had met only the day before? Had Lucy ever woven that same spell about him? But Lucy would have said, matter-of-factly, Come down to earth, Rabbi. Spells are for the birds, as both you and I know. The evening had cost him about twenty dollars. When was the last time he had asked Lucy to have dinner with him at the Inn or some such place? But then Lucy was there. She would always be there, and there would be time for everything later. Procrastination was a salve.
He couldn’t get to sleep that night. He tossed and turned and twisted and changed his position again and again, and then, finally, he gave it up and put on a robe. The house was icy cold. He tried to endure it at first, his robe pulled tightly about him, thinking that after spending the price of a week’s grocery shopping under Lucy’s careful control, he had no right to burn oil. But asceticism had never been one of David’s strong points, clerical or otherwise, and after a few minutes he turned up the heat, satisfied that his mental suffering was sufficient to temper his guilt. It was late enough, or early enough, depending on how one regarded the night, for his thoughts to move turgidly, and as he reviewed the events of Saturday night, he tried to frame them in relation to himself.
It was not simple. He was a man who loved women, and he had loved women ever since he could remember, even as a small child. In his manhood, women intrigued him, delighted him, fascinated him, and made him feel, again and again, that the fate of humanity, already halfway down the sewer, was perhaps retrievable through the intervention of women. And, happily, he had been loved by a number of women, but under very special circumstances; for like so many of his generation he had come into his manhood during the bloodiest and most terrible war that had ever been.
Then he had married.
He brooded over his marriage to Lucy. He had never been unfaithful to her. Why should he be? He dispensed the vows of marriage and he respected them, and Lucy was a lovely young woman, bright and totally committed to her husband — which, considering his profession, income, and place in the world, was no easy thing. They had their bleak moments, but all things considered, he had felt that theirs was a good marriage. And then Sarah Comstock had entered his world.
He had tried to help her — or had he? He had kissed her and embraced her. I didn’t go to bed with her, he told himself angrily. I helped her. She said I had helped her. She made a point of that.
He walked into his study then, turned on a light, and dropped into his desk chair, tired and miserable. His mail of that day, still unopened, was piled on his desk, and there, on top, was a letter from Mike Benton. Since he couldn’t sleep, David decided that he might as well read his mail. He began with Benton’s letter.
“Dear Rabbi Hartman,” Benton wrote. “Thank goodness I joined your congregation, because I am the most unbelieving son of a bitch in the world, and I don’t like Jews any more than I like Catholics or Protestants, except the people and not the cruds who work the pulpits — excluding you, naturally — and as far as God is concerned, if I believed in the stupid bastard who gets his jollies out of things like this war we were in and Shithead Adolf, I’d spend my life writing editorials against him and maybe get a petition out to make him bug off and find some other solar system to work out his lunatic fantasies.”
David paused, thinking that it was an amazingly long and awkward sentence, but that hidden somewhere in it was the meat of an interesting sermon, and then said aloud, “Oh, no, Hartman, you ought to go and hand in your credentials. Here’s a member of your congregation in agony, which he can only spell out in his own way, and a few hours ago you left a woman in another kind of agony, and all you can do is mine the situation for one of your lousy sermons.”
But he also realized that even his act of indicting himself aloud to an empty room was brush and spit and polish for his ego, making him no better and possibly a bit worse.
“All right,” he said aloud to the empty room. “Stop trying to be any better, because that stinks too.”
He went back to the letter and read: “All of the above being in line with the fact that I can write to you. Who can you write to in a federal jail? Your bookie, mistress, friendly dope pusher — perish the thought. These careful Feds specify: you can write to your lawyer, mother, father, sisters, brothers, priest, minister, rabbi. Since I still owe my lawyer twelve large ones, he certainly does not wish to waste his time communicating with me, and I lack mother, father, sister, and brother. Poor Mitzie, poor dear, is not related to me, and that leaves Rabbi Hartman; but I know you’ll read the letter to her, since she has suffered so much more than I have from this demented business. The terror I felt about going in here has gradually diminished, and now, three weeks after I began to serve my sentence, I am a little at ease.
“I think they had good reason for sending me here. By they, I mean James Bennett, who is the Federal Commissioner of Prisons, a civilized man laboring in a troglodyte jungle; and here is a work prison in the West Virginia mountains. Anything we write about the physical make-up of the prison will be censored out, but I can say that it’s fairly civilized as prisons go, and I imagine Bennett would like me to write about it after I get out, five months from now. Six months. One of the cons here says, ‘Six months — I can do that standing on my head.’ To me, it’s an e
ternity, and it even makes that weird little Wasp village, Leighton Ridge, look good. Mitzie, my dear friend and rabbi, is still living in the house we rented. Please look her up and let her read this. Also, tell her I’m very fond of her. Shit — pull out the stops. Tell her I love her.”
David went back to bed then, and this time he slept until he was awakened about eight o’clock in the morning by a phone call from Lucy.
“I thought I’d get this in before the wedding starts. I’m not angry. I love you. Did I wake you?”
“I was up late reading.” First lie.
“Hot milk. Did you take a glass of hot milk? You may not believe me, but drink a glass of hot milk and you sleep like a baby. David, you should see the tent they put up here. Not a tent, exactly; a Jewish pavilion right out of the Middle Ages. Are you there?”
“I’m not sure where I am, Lucy. At three in the morning I was sitting at my desk reading a letter from Mike Benton, poor devil.”
“Where is he?”
“In some miserable jail in West Virginia.”
“Just for refusing to play informer. Dave, it’s crazy. We’ll be home tonight. I don’t like this business of you sitting awake at three o’clock in the morning. The wedding should be over by six at the latest, and we can take a late train. Will you meet us?”
“Of course I’ll meet you. Just hang on and I’ll get the timetable.”
“And get a nap in before the judge comes.”
“The judge? What judge?” He had forgotten completely.
He had a ten o’clock adult class on “The Old Testament As History,” and he took a cold shower to clear his head. The class had been working on the question of the Samaritans, and David had found himself as fascinated as his students with this strange people of ancient Israel, whose history was so tragic and so little remembered. In spite of his sleepless night, he managed. He had twelve men and women in his Bible class, and since that meant giving up hours of their Sunday morning, he felt that he was doing pretty well.
But as he walked back to the new house the congregation had provided for him, a sort of bastardized ranch house-Colonial creation, his thoughts returned to the incident of the night before. He had to face the fact that not only did he want to see Sarah Comstock again, but his desire to do so was like a hunger.
Waiting for Jack Osner’s friend, Judge Interman, to arrive was much more a wait for Sarah Comstock to telephone him. But she did not telephone, and at exactly three o’clock on that Sunday afternoon, Jack Osner drove up with Judge Interman.
David watched them from a window, trying to get some sense of the man before meeting him, but Interman came off simply as a well-fed, very ordinary, and somewhat overweight middle-class, middle-aged man, his thick thatch of hair, gray turning white, his face pudgy. He appeared to have a nervous habit of biting his lower lip, but that might reflect only his current stress.
Nodding earnestly, he shook hands with David. His handshake was tentative, not an unusual thing among those who shook hands with a rabbi, a kind uncertainty which was reflected in the way he studied David.
“Bill Interman and I go back a long ways,” Osner said. “We clerked together for the same justice of the Supreme Court, and before that we were at Harvard together. True, I remained a plain old country lawyer, while he’s up there on the bench as a federal district judge, but that’s the way the cards are dealt.”
“Jack’s an old friend,” Interman acknowledged.
“Suppose I leave you two alone. I’ll wander over to the synagogue, and then when you’ve finished your talk, David will take you over there and I’ll drive you back to my house.”
Interman nodded, and Osner left. David suggested that they sit down in his small study. Interman appeared to be clamped into silence, and David waited. Finally, Interman asked him how old he was.
“I’m thirty-four, Judge Interman. If you feel that you can’t say what you wish to say to a man as young as myself, I can understand that. I won’t be offended.”
“Still, Jack Osner tells me you’ve been through all kinds of hell.”
“I was overseas during the war, if that’s what you mean.”
Interman nodded. “If we talk, is what I say privileged?”
“You mean the way it would be if I were your attorney? I’m not sure, but I don’t think so.”
“It is with a priest.”
“Yes. But confession is an integral part of the Catholic faith. That’s not the case with ours.” And then, seeing Interman’s increased state of anxiety, David added, “But I can tell you this. If you wish our talk to remain secret, it will. You will simply have to trust me.”
“Do you mind if I smoke?” Interman asked.
“No, not at all.”
His hand was shaking as he lit his cigarette. “Trouble is sleep,” he said. “I haven’t been sleeping since this began.”
David nodded and waited. His previous experience with judges had been limited to several tours of duty as a juror, but that had been sufficient to impress him with the fact that the black-gowned figure seated at the end of a courtroom was both subjectively and objectively a small tin god, more powerful in a certain sense than any other element of so-called civilized society. Now the federal judge in his study was staring at him hopelessly, power and arrogance gone.
“Have you been following the case of the atom bomb spies?” Judge Interman asked suddenly, apropos of no introduction or indication, blinking his eyes as if he had just awakened.
“Only what I read in the papers.”
“How do you feel about them?”
“I feel sorry. I feel sad and confused,” David said. “I have a member of my congregation, a brilliant screenwriter, who is serving a year in a federal penitentiary because he would not reveal the names of people he saw at left-wing meetings. I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry and ashamed for my country.”
“Do you mean that you sympathize with these people?” the judge demanded.
“I’m a rabbi. I sympathize with people who suffer. Do you find that so astonishing, Judge Interman? I also sympathize with you, because you had to sit in judgment.”
“No, sir,” Interman said harshly. “Not because I was the judge in the case. These people betrayed their country.”
“Yes, they did.”
“I think,” the judge said, “that I may have come to the wrong place.”
“Perhaps.”
Yet Interman made no motion to leave. He didn’t rise; he didn’t look at his watch. He simply sat there, staring at David, and after a few minutes had gone by, David said gently, “I’ll listen, and I’ll try to help. Whether or not I can, I don’t know. But I’ll try.”
“I have some leeway in sentencing them,” Interman said. “I suppose you realize that.”
“So I’ve read.”
“You don’t just sentence two such people in a case like this. God Almighty, no. We’re dealing with a death sentence, and that’s what I couldn’t face. Do you understand why?”
“I think so. You’re Jewish and they’re Jewish. But you felt they deserved the death sentence?”
“Don’t you, Rabbi?”
“I’m not a judge,” David said.
“So I asked that I be removed from the case, that some other judge pass sentence. I’m not evading my duty. I sat through the case. The jury brought in a verdict of guilty.”
“Why must it be a death sentence?” David asked. “Civilized countries are doing away with capital punishment.”
“I thought of that too. Don’t think I didn’t consider it, but certain things happened.”
David waited.
“The President got in touch with me. He asked me to come down to Washington —” He paused, staring past David at the wall. “I was flattered. Anyone would be flattered. Can you understand that, Rabbi? An invitation from the White House, you’re flattered. Well, my God, the case had taken the guts out of me, and I handled it. I didn’t run for cover because I was a Jew. I did my duty, and it makes sense t
hat I was being invited down to Washington for a pat on the shoulder, doesn’t it?”
“It makes sense,” David agreed.
“Well, I’m down there. I’m taken into his office. He doesn’t even offer to shake hands with me. He just says to me, flatly, ‘Judge Interman, I want you to sentence them to death.”
“‘With all due deference, Mr. President,’ I said to him, ‘I can’t pass the death sentence on those two people.’ And then he looks at me as cold as ice, Rabbi, and he says to me, ‘What in hell do you mean, you can’t?’” He paused and closed his eyes. Then he opened them and looked around the room. “You’ve never been in that office?”
“Never been to Washington in my life,” David said.
“No. Well, it does something to you. I tried to explain. I said to him, ‘Mr. President, please try to understand the position I am in. These will be the first two people to be executed for espionage in our time, and they’re both Jewish. I’m Jewish, and God knows there’s talk enough that they’ve been singled out because they’re Jewish.’”
“You said that?”
“Rabbi, you’d have to close your eyes and your ears not to know that.”
“What did he say?”
“He was enraged with me. ‘You don’t spill that kind of garbage in here. They were on trial because they were spies, not because they were Jewish’ — or some such thing. I can’t remember exactly. I never knew the man could have such anger. I tried to make him understand that if I gave them a death sentence, it would be the end of my existence as a normal human being. I would live on as the judge who had sentenced them to death. Am I right, Rabbi? Tell me, am I right?”
“I think so, yes.”
“How would you look at me? I sit here. Here’s Interman. He sentenced a Jewish man and woman to death, the first in the twentieth century to be so sentenced. That’s what I tried to explain to him, Rabbi. Goddamnit, I am somebody! I paid my dues! He was a political hack from his beginning. I am a judge in a federal court. I’m a human being. Who the hell is he? This is supposed to be a democracy. I stood up to him. I told him, ‘No, I will not do it. You want a death sentence, get someone else to do it. You didn’t appoint me, and I’m not your errand boy.’ Then he just studies me for a while, and then he says, ‘It’s pretty damn good, being a judge, isn’t it?’ I didn’t know what to make of that. With all that’s been written about him, he’s not an easy man to talk to. Not for me, in any case. He has that bland middle-America face and those rimless glasses. I kept thinking about George Babbitt. Did you ever read Babbitt, Rabbi?”