by Howard Fast
“I’m not sure. What happened?”
“Something turned off. I play with the kids. I play with the dog. I see members of my congregation put up a thousand dollars for a Bar Mitzvah. I begin to write a sermon and something inside of me says, Don’t make waves —”
“I have two kids,” Lucy said. “I shop, I cook, I feed them, I feed you, I make the beds, clean the house, and still teach two classes at Sunday school, and I think we have a decent sex life, and God Almighty, why isn’t that enough? It’s enough for me, but you and all your mystical, weird beliefs about the Lamed Vou, the just and righteous men who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders — well, goddamnit to hell, David, nobody carries the weight of the world on his shoulders, and this stinking, forsaken globe is just what it is and nothing more, a place where morons get their kicks out of murdering Jews and anyone else they don’t like, and we’re lucky to be here in one of the most beautiful places in the country, and why can’t you —” She broke off, burst into tears, and ran out of the room and upstairs to the bedroom. Upstairs, Sarah began to wail. Aaron had taken her drum and was pounding away on it. David went upstairs to where Lucy, still sobbing, was trying to quiet the children. Frightened at her tears, both children became quiet.
“I didn’t mean to burden you with all that,” David said.
“I know.”
He kissed her, and her response was perfunctory. She rose and went into the bathroom to clean her face. David followed her. Watching him in her mirror, she said, “Maybe you would have been happier with Sarah Comstock. Maybe she would have understood you. Maybe she would be alive today if she could have been your wife.”
“My God,” David whispered. “How long have you known?”
“Since last year. I never meant to tell you. Sarah told Millie, and Millie talked to me about it. Millie thought it would go on and make mincemeat out of our lives and our marriage, but then that poor woman killed herself — and all I knew was that I still had you, and David, I love you so much, so much —” She was crying again. He took her in his arms and held her tightly.
It snowed that night, and in the morning there were six inches of virgin white on the hills of Leighton Ridge. David shoveled a path to the road, followed closely by his two children and their dog, all of them delighted with the rewards of winter. His house was a hundred yards from the synagogue, much of the walk covered by drifted snow over a foot high. David was pleased to see three youthful volunteers clearing the way. For the next eight months, he would be at the synagogue every morning at eight o’clock. In the normal course of things, David, like a good many Reform rabbis, did not hold daily services, but when Dr. Henry Levine’s mother passed away, he put the problem to David. “I won’t rest easily unless I say the mourner’s Kaddish. She was very frum. I’m not, but I adored her, David. So which is it? Do I drive all the distance to Bridgeport, with my office in Westport, or do we work out a minyan?” — a minyan being the company of ten men required for a service.
Not only did David like Henry Levine as a person, but each time Lucy called him frantically to minister to one of the children, he stubbornly refused to accept payment. Whereupon, David immediately agreed to the minyan. That had been four months ago, each morning a desperate struggle to corral ten Jews of appropriate age and sex. The fact that the ten congregants required for the minyan were limited by Jewish law to the male sex drove home the foolishness and waste of male chauvinism; but on the other hand, whenever David brought up the possibility of women being included in the minyan, the Orthodox and Conservative members of his congregation objected so violently that he let the matter drop.
On this morning of the snowfall, they were short the proverbial tenth man. For a while, they were at the point of desperation, with Dr. Levine driven to the extremity of calling a number of his patients, but even the sick ones had struggled out of bed to go to work. Then, happily, David remembered the two volunteers who always turned up to shovel a path from the parking lot to the synagogue, each of them fifteen years old — males of an age to be admitted — Bar Mitzvahed in this very temple.
When the morning service was over, David went outside, to find Martin striding energetically down the road past the synagogue. David called out, “Hold on a bit, Martin. I’ll walk with you.”
For a few minutes they strode on in silence, kicking through the snow and emitting clouds of frosty breath; then David said, “I don’t know how to get into this, so I might as well plunge. Last night, Lucy told me she knew about me and Sarah Comstock, and that she had known since it happened.”
“There wasn’t much to know, David.”
“I’ve been eating myself up with the question of how responsible I was for what happened.”
“It was her seventh suicide attempt in three years. She was gifted, beautiful, and brilliant, and it wasn’t Harvey’s drinking that drove her to it. He lives with worse guilt than yours. Don’t think that you Jews have a monopoly on guilt. I could show you shades of white Protestant guilt that you never even dreamed of.”
“Then why did she do it?”
“God knows.”
They walked on, taking a path through a clump of woods that separated the new synagogue from the old Congregational church that was now the Unitarian church. The snow began to fall again, small, unhurried flakes that gave promise of a long, deep snowfall. “In Maine,” Martin said, “where I grew up, it would begin like this, and then go on for hours. Not a breath of wind. Just a holy stillness.”
“It’s strange,” David said, “how completely you people have united Christianity with winter and snow. Have you ever been to Israel?”
“Someday, David, the four of us will go together.”
“I’d like that. But it’s hot there, sunbaked and hot. I remember a snowstorm in New York when all the traffic stopped. Nothing moved. What am I doing, Martin? This is a crazy pretense. We’re walking through the snow as if it’s some impossible stage set. Oh, Jesus Christ, what frauds we are!”
“Jesus Christ — I never heard you say that before.”
“Don’t make anything of it,” David said sourly.
Martin looked at his watch. “In a half-hour, they’ll be dead.”
“You know Mike Benton?” David asked, as if he had not heard Martin at all.
“I met him once, yes.”
“He was an odd case, a valid war hero who was terrified of prison. Well, he made it, all right; got through six months, and it wasn’t as awful as he had imagined it would be, except for the first eleven days.”
“Why the first eleven days?”
“Because they were spent in Washington, D.C., penitentiary — from all I’ve been told, an old pesthole of a prison, tier upon tier of cells, electric gates, solitary confinement for any step out of line, prisoners eating in silence in the well at the bottom of the cell block. Well, the warden of the prison has a sense of humor and he hates reds, so for the eleven days Mike was there, a sort of staging period, the warden had him in death row.”
“What a rotten thing to do!”
“Ah, yes, there’s a lot of rotten around. But the point is that Mike insists that no one who has not experienced something of what he went through those eleven days can properly understand the meaning of capital punishment. He slept very little those eleven nights. The screaming, sobbing, and various vocal terrors of the condemned men kept him awake.”
They walked on in silence. The snowfall became heavier. Martin Carter looked at his watch again and said, “Ten minutes more.”
“Damn you, Martin!” David exclaimed. “Damn you! What are you, some kind of ghoul?”
“No, David, it’s just that there are certain things a goy can’t understand no matter how hard he tries. Yes, I am sick and disgusted at what is happening a few miles from here at Sing Sing Prison, where in a few minutes two people will be put to death. These two so-called atom spies are not being executed because they are spies, but because they are Jewish. I know it. You know it. And every Jew in Ameri
ca whose head isn’t buried under five feet of sand knows it. And Millie’s brother Sam, the one who’s a congressman from Springfield, he tells us that the F.B.I. at first used the threat of a death sentence to get them to implicate others, and then the President picked it up and pressured the judge. So I know that, and Millie knows that, and probably most members of Congress know that — and yet the Jewish community in America is as silent as the night. Not a word —”
“There have been words,” David protested.
“Whispers, whispers. We are less than ten years from the Holocaust, and this symbolic slaughter and sacrifice to all the dark gods takes place in silence — that’s what I don’t understand, the silence.”
David looked at his own watch, and he said mournfully, “They’re dead, Martin.”
The snow was so heavy now that it was like a curtain between the two men, and David said to Martin, his voice hoarse, “What Mike Benton said about death row, you see, Martin, my friend and Congregational minister, think about it, think about it, because we have been on death row for two thousand years.”
Martin stared at David, a ghostly figure behind the curtain of snow. He started to speak and then swallowed his words. And then, after a long moment, he said, “Let’s get home, David. The snow’s a foot deep already.”
They clumped on home through the snow in silence. David’s house was first along the way, and he urged Martin to come in for some hot tea, but Martin said no, he had a lot of thinking to do, and he might as well start on it right now.
Giving David hot tea and dry socks, Lucy saw the grief on his face and asked him, “What is it, David? What happened? Is it the execution?”
“All during the war,” he said slowly, “we believed that we were on the edge of change. In one way or another, we all believed that. We had tracked the devil to his lair, and now it only remained to go in and destroy him. Then the world would be different. But, you know, it won’t be any different, Lucy, it never will.”
“Perhaps not, but you still have your post-Bar Mitzvah class in Talmud this afternoon, and you’re always telling me what a mind-bender it is. How about a hot bath and a good lunch? Hamburger and home fries.”
“You’re kidding?”
“No — I have the hamburger in the fridge. You can bet I’m not going out in that snow.” But as soon as David was in the tub, Lucy called Millie Carter and asked her, “What on earth happened with the two of them, out there in that snowstorm?”
“I can’t get a word out of Martin.”
“Same here.”
“Give it a little time,” Millie said.
Lucy fed the children first and then did something unusual for her. She put them in front of the television so that she might have a quiet hour with David. He had many gifts, but a subtle and sophisticated taste for food was not one of them, and as he once explained to her, he had practically grown up on hamburgers and home fries. But he had no appetite today. “Will you forgive me, Lucy, please. It’s wonderful and it smells marvelous, and I can’t eat it.”
She got up and came around the table and kissed him.
“What’s that for?”
“Just one of those things. Coffee?”
He drank the coffee and munched a piece of bread. “No one should have to face an executioner,” he said. “It’s a mean, ugly vengeance that we exact. I sometimes wonder whether we are sane, any of us, any of the human race.” He shook his head. “What are we doing here, Lucy?”
“You know what I’m going to do,” she said. “I’m going to put a dollar in the cookie jar every time you ask me that question. It’ll pay for a trip abroad.”
“It’s just that wherever I look, I seem to see something demented. I want it to be them, so that I could say to myself, they’re demented, but we’re sane. You know Leon Kramer?”
“His wife, poor thing, is constantly pregnant. Four children, and a fifth on its way.”
“Appears to be a very nice fellow, but very Orthodox. To him, we are only one step to the left of the Catholic Church —”
“Come on,” Lucy said.
“Well — almost. Reform Judaism, in his lights, has already made a pact with the devil. He feels that he’s our conscience, and that’s why he continues as a member. You notice, he always has a yarmulke. Last week he came to me for an eruv.”
“What on earth is an eruv?”
“Well, according to the strictures of the Orthodox Jews, on the Sabbath — from sundown on Friday to sundown Saturday — nothing can be carried out of the house. The act of pushing a baby carriage is considered to be carrying, so when one has an absolute need to give the baby a little sunshine and fresh air, an eruv is created, a symbolic area that extends the house. You do this by enclosing an area with a string, say as big as the front yard and back yard, and lo and behold, it becomes your house, and baby can be wheeled out without breaking the Law.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I am not kidding. I am demonstrating insanity — harmless, but still beyond the pale of reason, and no more insane than a thousand laws and strictures of every other religion. There are whole areas of New York that have been enclosed with a string for an eruv — well, we’re not so special, but God help me, I put myself here. Does God distinguish between those two so-called atom spies and the six million Jews cremated in Hitler’s ovens? The world goes on. God is busy trying to sort out the souls of those cremated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the ashes of the camps — or does a soul remain after you’ve been seared into nothingness —”
“Stop it!” Lucy cried. “What are you doing? What are you doing to me, to you?”
“I’m sorry,” David said. “I’m sorry.”
That night he awoke screaming, and his screams awakened Lucy and the children. Sarah ran into Aaron’s room and huddled under the covers with him. Lucy shook David awake and then held him tightly in her arms. She knew about the dream; she knew its content so well she might have dreamed it herself. In life, at the time, David had stood at the edge of the open grave where the bodies of three thousand Jewish dead had been flung, the bodies naked, men and women together, starved almost to death before being murdered, the skin clinging tight to the bones, arms and legs askew, faces like skulls with features ineptly painted, and out of the huge open grave came the dreadful, unbearable stink of rotting flesh. So it had been, as David told her, when Captain David Hartman, chaplain in the 45th Division of the Seventh Army stood at the edge of the open grave; but in the recurrent dream, always the same, David was one of the bodies in the grave, looking up at the American soldiers who stood on the grave’s edge.
He opened his eyes, shivering, sweating. “I was in both places this time,” he whispered, “in the grave and outside, looking down. That was too terrible.”
“It’s all right now,” Lucy whispered. “It’s all right. It’s just a dream.”
She went into Aaron’s room. The two little bodies were huddled under the covers.
“You know about bad dreams,” Lucy said. “Both of you have had bad dreams. Now Daddy had one.”
“He’s dead,” Aaron moaned. “That’s the way it sounds when you get dead.”
“That’s the silliest thing I ever heard. David,” she called, “would you come in here.” To Aaron she said, “You can’t see through the covers.”
The children poked their heads out. David came into the room and lifted Aaron in his arms. Then Sarah demanded to be lifted. Aaron decided he was afraid to go back to sleep.
“Then we’ll all go downstairs and have hot milk.”
The children fell asleep drinking their milk, and David and Lucy carried them up to bed. Lucy, who was only an occasional smoker, wanted a cigarette very much now. She lit one and curled up on the bedroom lounge, an ancient upholstered chaise her mother had given her. David got back into bed and lay watching her, propped up on his elbow.
“Women suffer,” Lucy said, “but men suffer more.”
“Who told you that?”
“I figured it
out.”
“That’s pretty smart.”
“I don’t think so. I think every lady knows it. That’s why we forgive you for fucking up the whole damned universe.”
“You have to watch your language, baby. Not only am I a rabbi, but we have two little kids.”
“I use beautiful language only when we’re alone. You know that. It comes when I am at a loss for other words because there are no other words that fit the case.”
“I’ve never seen you at a loss for words.”
“There’s a lot about me you don’t know.”
“Put away the cigarette and come in and lie next to me.”
In the morning, the snow had stopped, and Jack Osner’s son, Adam, was digging out the Hartman walk — for which he was paid three dollars. “Well, Rabbi,” he said to David when David came to the door to pay him, “I guess this is the last time I do this for you. I’m not leaving you in the lurch, though. The Schwab kid is taking over from me. He doesn’t have my class when it comes to tossing snow, but there it is. He’s the best I can do.”
“I’m sure he’ll learn.”
“Does it snow in Washington?”
“On occasion.”
“I hate to go. I really hate to go. I grew up here. My friends are here. You know something, Rabbi, the first kid I ever fought with for calling me a dirty Jew bastard, well, he’s my best friend. Now I have to start all over again.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” David said. “That’s kid stuff. I don’t think it will happen in Washington.”
When David got to the synagogue a half-hour later, Nash MacGregor was performing the same function, cutting a path through the foot-deep snow from Temple Shalom to the parking lot. MacGregor was a black man in his forties, tall, wide-shouldered, and strong. He lived in Bridgeport with a wife and three children, and he had worked for years in a box factory owned by a member of David’s congregation. The factory was sold three years ago, and the new owner did not employ blacks. David needed a custodian for the new synagogue, and MacGregor was recommended to him. MacGregor was a good, hard-working man. Friday nights he slept over in the basement; other nights he went home. It was still a time when no black was permitted to live in any of the towns on the Fairfield County Ridge, something David became aware of only after he had hired MacGregor. There was a tiny cottage, an old farmhouse, on the edge of the synagogue property, and it occurred to David that this would be a convenient home for MacGregor and his family, sparing the black man the long ride to Bridgeport. It was on sale for six thousand dollars, and MacGregor assured David that he could get it in shape himself. “But they won’t sell,” MacGregor said; “take my word for that, Rabbi.”