The Outsider

by Howard Fast

  “It stinks,” he said flatly.

  “David, you’ve never said anything like that in your life. What am I marrying?”

  “We’ll work that out.”

  “I suppose we will.” Della sighed. “I do suppose we will.”

  David was in his office at the synagogue the following morning when Lucy arrived, and as he stood up, she went to him and threw her arms, around him. “David, David, David.” In her forty-ninth year, Lucy was still a most attractive woman, her features hardened somewhat, her skin tighter as a result of a face-lift David did not even suspect, her figure trim and tightened by hours of Los Angeles exercise classes. “Oh, David,” she sobbed, “the whole thing is lousy. Life is such a bag of crud. Mom is gone, and I have no one. The kids do their own thing and don’t even know that I exist.”

  “You have your husband,” David said gently.

  “And so have five other women. Oh, hell, why am I crying on your shoulder? I made my own bed. As for Bob Greene, he’s too busy. Too goddamned busy to come to my mother’s funeral.”

  “Death is awful,” David said. “It’s the black monster that lives with us always, but it’s also a part of being. Don’t brood over Bob’s problems. Your mother had love and a wonderful daughter and two fine grandchildren. By the way, where are they?”

  “You think that? I mean, you say a wonderful daughter. The kids will be here. Aaron was in Los Angeles and Sarah in Arizona. David, there was a time, wasn’t there, when families stayed together?”

  “Yes, but now it’s different.”

  “Everything is.”

  “We made all the arrangements, Lucy. The casket will be brought here, and your mother will lie beside your father.”

  She had drawn back, but now she embraced him again. It felt good to have her in his arms, something familiar and comforting out of long, long ago. “David, you were always so good to me. My life stinks, David. I could come back here now. I could hack it here.”

  “That’s an odd way to put it, Lucy.”

  “I know. Just talk. As you told me once before, a week or two here and I’d go crazy.”

  He was not going to talk to her about Della, but she picked up on that and said, “Oh, David, you’re not going to marry Della Klein, are you?”

  “Yes. I didn’t want to tell you now.”

  “And how would you keep it from me here where everyone knows when the rabbi sneezes? How can you do it, David? You’re a wonderful man. How can you live out your life in this crummy hole? It’s nothing, and Della is a fat, frowsy, middle-aged housewife. There’s a world out there. If you want to be a rabbi, there are other places to be a rabbi. There’s a temple in Sepulveda Pass in Los Angeles that makes this synagogue look like Martin’s church compared to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Why are you doing this?” She broke into tears again, and David took her in his arms.

  “It will be all right, darling.”

  At the cemetery, at the open grave, David said, “We say goodbye now to a lovely and gracious woman. We are not a funerary religion. We honor life, not death, and the reward we look to is here, in the life we live and the people we love and who love us. Sally Spendler, my mother-in-law and dear friend, was a woman well loved and richly rewarded.”

  After all the others had gone, Lucy and David and their two children remained at the grave for a time. “Will it be taken care of?” Lucy asked, pointing to the mound of raw dirt. “And who will see to the stone?”

  Aaron, tall, lean, stood with his arm around her. “Pop will take care of those things.”

  “Of course,” David said. Sarah was next to him, her hand in his. Even with death, as he told Della later, it was a good moment. Even though Lucy said unhappily, “I’ve left instructions to be cremated when the time comes, David, so don’t save space for me.”

  At the airport, she said to him, “I don’t know when I’ll see you again, David. I can’t come running once you’re married.”

  “I’m here.”

  “All right, my dear David.” And then she threw her arms around him and kissed him. She was alone on the plane.

  Aaron and Sarah had been dropped off by David in New York. They wanted to spend a day or two in the city before they went home.

  Almost as if it had never happened. He had once asked Martin, “How often do you see your kids?”

  His son, Joe, was established in Canada and a Canadian citizen now. “Eight months ago was the last time,” Martin had said. “How time flies!” Martin’s daughter, Ellie, was living in Boston, married to an M.I.T. professor. “She tries to get down here with her kids every few months — well, sometimes only at Christmas.”

  “On the other hand,” Della said, “how would you feel if they needed you every moment of the day? They’re independent. That counts for a lot.”

  A few weeks later, David said to Della, “I’ve been talking to the board, and they feel we should be married in the synagogue in a public sense.”

  “Oh, the hell with them,” Della said. “We’re not kids. Let’s go to City Hall and get it over with.”

  “There’s no city hall at Leighton Ridge. You know that. There isn’t even a judge or a magistrate, only the First Selectman, and I’m not even sure that he has the right to perform a marriage. You seem to forget I’m a rabbi. The first thing you give up when you become a rabbi is the right to say the hell with them.”

  “Then get a rabbi,” Della said. “I’m amiable. How about that old man, Rabbi Belsen, whom you talk about?”

  “May he rest in peace — twelve years now.”

  “I’m sorry. Oh, anyone, David.”

  David called Bert Sager. “Will I marry you?” Rabbi Sager asked. “Only if you’re a woman, and even then I’d think twice about it. You are too old and too skinny. Like our eminent precursor, Socrates, I learned about marriage the hard way. Forgive me, David, I have a primitive sense of humor, and I make childish jokes. As so many in my congregation say, a rabbi with a sense of humor who is funny is an asset, but a rabbi with a sense of humor who is not funny is expendable. So if you want me to perform a ceremony, let’s do it while I still have a congregation. By the way, whom are you marrying?”

  “Della Klein.”

  “Blessings. I don’t know the lady, but she sounds Jewish.”

  “I think she is,” David said.

  “Good, good. You know, it must be seen as a sort of a Mitzvah when a Conservative rabbi like myself marries one of the Reform faith. Where will the ceremony be and when?”

  “A week from Sunday, noon, at our synagogue here in Leighton Ridge. Please bring your wife. We’re planning nothing very grand, my two kids if I can get them to come, Della’s kids, and some old friends. We’ll have the ceremony at the synagogue, and then a buffet dinner at Della’s home, so if you could plan to stay on until late in the afternoon, that would be very pleasant.”

  To David’s amazement, both his children turned up in Leighton Ridge the day before the wedding, each alone, having managed to dispense for a few days with their mates — “just in terms of the cost of air fare,” Sarah explained. At twenty-two, she was an impossibly healthy, freckled, clear-eyed woman. Her brother, Aaron, explained further, “Well, it’s a kind of a special thing. We always looked at Della and Mel as part of the family. I don’t recall Mel too well, but we both remember him warmly.” Della’s three children were their old friends. “You didn’t expect them, did you?” Della said to David. “I mean, so soon after coming here for the funeral.”

  David nodded, his eyes moist. Rabbi Sager said to him, “You know, Hartman, I’ve known you a long time, but I’ve never seen you in this context. With your reputation as some kind of wild-eyed radical, raging at the evil in high places, denouncing war, going to prison, turning up on every picket line within a hundred miles of here for over a quarter of a century — it doesn’t jibe. You’re a very sweet and quiet man, and these people adore you, and that includes even my wife, who doesn’t like rabbis very much.”

  David nodded. He
didn’t trust his voice.

  He and Della were married on the bimah, the platform at the front of the synagogue, where he had stood and preached, ever since the new synagogue had been built in the little village on the Connecticut ridge.

  At Della’s house, packed with friends, including Mike Benton, who had come in from the Coast, Martin said to David softly, “We’ve both been privileged, old friend. There are moments when a human being must do what we do as an audience in the theater, enter a suspension of disbelief. It gives us a moment of clarity to thank God for all things.”

  Later that evening, when all the guests had gone, David told Della what Martin had said.

  “I think I understand,” she said uncertainly.

  “You see,” David said, “the disbelief is the crutch for evil — or so some of us see it. Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil, but it’s the mindless childishness of evil that hurts us.”

  “Oh, yes, yes.” Della sighed. “On the other hand, it’s late and we’ve had a long day, and all I know, Rabbi, about God or anything else, is that there’s a great darkness out there, and a man or a woman should not sleep alone. I’m happy to be your wife, and I love you, and I’m lucky. Shall we go to bed?”

  “As you wish, Mrs. Hartman.”

  “I’ll have to get used to that. Do you know, David, in all the years we know each other, I’ve never asked you a question — well, from myself as a foolish woman to you as a wise rabbi.”

  “You’re far from foolish, and only you would be loving enough to call me wise.”

  “Anyway, my dear Rabbi, here it is: Does it make any sense at all, this life we live — or is it, as Shakespeare suggested, a walking shadow that struts for an hour, or something of the sort?”

  “You can take your choice, my dear,” David said. “I love you very much, if I didn’t mention that before, and I’m tired, and, like you, I’ve slept alone too many nights. So let’s go to bed, and we’ll talk about philosophy and religion over breakfast.”

  “Heaven forbid. I’ve invited your kids and mine for breakfast.”

  “Then let’s just go to bed.”

  “Amen to that,” Della said.

  A Biography of Howard Fast

  Howard Fast (1914–2003), one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century, was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. Fast’s commitment to championing social justice in his writing was rivaled only by his deftness as a storyteller and his lively cinematic style.

  Born on November 11, 1914, in New York City, Fast was the son of two immigrants. His mother, Ida, came from a Jewish family in Britain, while his father, Barney, emigrated from the Ukraine, changing his last name to Fast on arrival at Ellis Island. Fast’s mother passed away when he was only eight, and when his father lost steady work in the garment industry, Fast began to take odd jobs to help support the family. One such job was at the New York Public Library, where Fast, surrounded by books, was able to read widely. Among the books that made a mark on him was Jack London’s The Iron Heel, containing prescient warnings against fascism that set his course both as a writer and as an advocate for human rights.

  Fast began his writing career early, leaving high school to finish his first novel, Two Valleys (1933). His next novels, including Conceived in Liberty (1939) and Citizen Tom Paine (1943), explored the American Revolution and the progressive values that Fast saw as essential to the American experiment. In 1943 Fast joined the American Communist Party, an alliance that came to define—and often encumber—much of his career. His novels during this period advocated freedom against tyranny, bigotry, and oppression by exploring essential moments in American history, as in The American (1946). During this time Fast also started a family of his own. He married Bette Cohen in 1937 and the couple had two children.

  Congressional action against the Communist Party began in 1948, and in 1950, Fast, an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because he refused to provide the names of other members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, Fast was issued a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress. While in prison, he was inspired to write Spartacus (1951), his iconic retelling of a slave revolt during the Roman Empire, and did much of his research for the book during his incarceration. Fast’s appearance before Congress also earned him a blacklisting by all major publishers, so he started his own press, Blue Heron, in order to release Spartacus. Other novels published by Blue Heron, including Silas Timberman (1954), directly addressed the persecution of Communists and others during the ongoing Red Scare. Fast continued to associate with the Communist Party until the horrors of Stalin’s purges of dissidents and political enemies came to light in the mid-1950s. He left the Party in 1956.

  Fast’s career changed course in 1960, when he began publishing suspense-mysteries under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham. He published nineteen books as Cunningham, including the seven-book Masao Masuto mystery series. Also, Spartacus was made into a major film in 1960, breaking the Hollywood blacklist once and for all. The success of Spartacus inspired large publishers to pay renewed attention to Fast’s books, and in 1961 he published April Morning, a novel about the battle of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution. The book became a national bestseller and remains a staple of many literature classes. From 1960 onward Fast produced books at an astonishing pace—almost one book per year—while also contributing to screen adaptations of many of his books. His later works included the autobiography Being Red (1990) and the New York Times bestseller The Immigrants (1977).

  Fast died in 2003 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.

  Fast on a farm in upstate New York during the summer of 1917. Growing up, Fast often spent the summers in the Catskill Mountains with his aunt and uncle from Hunter, New York. These vacations provided a much-needed escape from the poverty and squalor of the Lower East Side’s Jewish ghetto, as well as the bigotry his family encountered after they eventually relocated to an Irish and Italian neighborhood in upper Manhattan. However, the beauty and tranquility Fast encountered upstate were often marred by the hostility shown toward him by his aunt and uncle. “They treated us the way Oliver Twist was treated in the orphanage,” Fast later recalled. Nevertheless, he “fell in love with the area” and continued to go there until he was in his twenties.

  Fast (left) with his older brother, Jerome, in 1935. In his memoir Being Red, Fast wrote that he and his brother “had no childhood.” As a result of their mother’s death in 1923 and their father’s absenteeism, both boys had to fend for themselves early on. At age eleven, alongside his thirteen-year-old brother, Fast began selling copies of a local newspaper called the Bronx Home News. Other odd jobs would follow to make ends meet in violent, Depression-era New York City. Although he resented the hardscrabble nature of his upbringing, Fast acknowledged that the experience helped form a lifelong attachment to his brother. “My brother was like a rock,” he wrote, “and without him I surely would have perished.”

  A copy of Fast’s military identification from World War II. During the war Fast worked as a war correspondent in the China-Burma-India theater, writing articles for publications such as PM, Esquire, and Coronet. He also contributed scripts to Voice of America, a radio program developed by Elmer Davis that the United States broadcast throughout occupied Europe.

  Here Fast poses for a picture with a fellow inmate at Mill Point prison, where he was sent in 1950 for his refusal to disclose information about other members of the Communist Party. Mill Point was a progressive federal institution made up of a series of army bunkhouses. “Everyone worked at the prison,” said Fast during a 1998 interview, “and while I hate prison, I hate the whole concept of prison, I must say this was the most intelligent and humane prison, probably that existed in America.” Indeed, Fast felt that his three-month stint there served him well as a writer: “I think a writer should see a little bit of prison and a little bit of war. Ne
ither of these things can be properly invented. So that was my prison.”

  Fast with his wife Bette and their two children, Jonathan and Rachel, in 1952. The family has a long history of literary achievement. Bette’s father founded the Hudson County News Company. Jonathan Fast would go on to become a successful popular novelist, as would his daughter, Molly, whose mother, Erica Jong, is the author of the groundbreaking feminist novel Fear of Flying. (Photo courtesy of Lotte Jacobi.)

  Fast at a bookstand during his campaign for Congress in 1952. He ran on the American Labor Party ticket for the twenty-third congressional district in the Bronx. Although Fast remained a committed leftist his entire life, he looked back on his foray into national politics with a bit of amusement. “I got a disease, which is called ‘candidateitis,’” he told Donald Swaim in a 1990 radio interview. “And this disease takes hold of your mind, and it convinces you that your winning an election is important, very often the most important thing on earth. And it grips you to a point that you’re ready to kill to win that election.” He concluded: “I was soundly defeated, but it was a fascinating experience.”

  In 1953, the Soviet Union awarded Fast the International Peace Prize. This photo from the ceremony shows the performer, publisher, and civil rights activist Paul Robeson delivering a speech before presenting Fast (seated, second from left) with the prestigious award. Robeson and Fast came to know each other through their participation in leftist political causes during the 1940s and were friends for many years. Like Fast, Robeson was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era and invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to answer questions. This led to Robeson’s work being banned in the United States, a situation that Robeson, unlike Fast, never completely overcame. In a late interview Fast cited Robeson as one of the forgotten heroes of the twentieth century. “Paul,” he said, “was an extraordinary man.” Also shown (from left to right): Essie Robeson, Mrs. Mellisk, Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, Rachel Fast, and Bette Fast. (Photo courtesy of Julius Lazarus and the author.)