The Promise (11 page)

Joseph Gordon saw me. He saw me as he was preparing himself to return a sharp serve heading his way from the arm of his brother, and he caught the ball instead and sang out, “The captain of the S.S.
Malter
!”

Abraham Gordon introduced me to his wife. She removed her sunglasses and I saw she had blue eyes, deep blue, Michael’s eyes. She wore no make-up. She offered me her hand and greeted me in a deep contralto voice. “Michael speaks of you as though you were his brother,” she said. “I’m very pleased.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I smiled and said nothing.

“I was wondering if you and your father were related to Henry Malter.”

“No.”

“Do you know who I mean?”

“The author of the critical edition of
Ta’anit
.”

“You are not related.”

“No.”

“How strange. Malter is not a particularly common name. Was it shortened?”

“Yes. From Maltovsky.”

“Your father is from Russia?”

“Yes.”

“And he shortened his name?” Her manner was friendly but somewhat formal and distant.

“He lived with a cousin when he first came here. His cousin convinced him to shorten it.”

“What is his cousin’s name?”

“He’s dead. We have no living relatives.”

“I see.”

“Reuven,” Joseph Gordon said, “how about joining us for some volleyball?” He was standing next to Ruth Gordon, smiling and tossing the ball from hand to hand.

“Reuven has come to go sailing with Michael,” Ruth Gordon said.

“I need help,” Joseph Gordon said.

“Nothing will help you,” Abraham Gordon said cheerfully. He wiped his brow with the back of his forearm. His body was covered with sweat.

“ ‘Let not him that girds on his armor boast as one who takes it off,’ ” Joseph Gordon quoted in Sephardic Hebrew from the First Book of Kings.

Abraham Gordon laughed.

“Where’s Rachel?” I asked.

“Inside the house,” Sarah Gordon said unhappily.

“Roaming through Ithaca,” Joseph Gordon said. “I could have used her.”

“I told you,” Abraham Gordon said. “Nothing will help.”

“She ought to be out in the sun on a day like this,” Sarah Gordon said. “But she’s inside the house.”

Ruth Gordon gazed over at Michael, who was sitting in the shade of the patio overhang, absorbed in his book.

“Michael,” she called.

Michael looked up immediately, startled.

“Reuven has come to take you sailing.”

Michael looked at me and his pale face lighted up.

“You have made a sailor out of my son,” Ruth Gordon said to me.

I saw Michael carefully insert a bookmark into place and put the book down on his chair. He came over to us, smiling.

“Hello,” he said to me. “Did you bring a Sailfish again?”

“Yes.”

Ruth Gordon was watching her son intently.

“Can we go out right away?” Michael asked.

I looked at Ruth and Abraham Gordon.

“Go ahead,” said Abraham Gordon.

“Have a good time, dear,” Ruth Gordon said to her son.

“Scram, you two,” Abraham Gordon said. “I want to finish trouncing my brother on the field of battle.”

“A ruthless warrior,” Joseph Gordon said.

Abraham Gordon laughed and wiped his brow again with his forearm.

“No Geneva Conventions here,” Joseph Gordon said.

Michael and I walked back across the lawn and the patio to the lake. Just before we started down the slope I turned and saw Ruth Gordon still standing on the lawn, watching us. She turned quickly and went toward the net.

We sailed for close to two hours and had a fine time. Michael was awkward for a while with the mainsail sheet and the tiller but the breeze was mild and we did not capsize and finally he caught on to it and we sailed smoothly. We did not go into any of the coves; we sailed, tacking back and forth in the warm breeze. I lay near the center board but the water was smooth and I did not have much to do. I closed my eyes and felt the gentle rolling of the Sailfish and the sun on my face. I felt myself drowsy and falling
asleep and opened my eyes and looked up at Michael. It seemed his own private sun shone out from behind his eyes. He looked at me and smiled, then looked up at the clouds. I saw him looking at the clouds and I closed my eyes and lay very still. I opened my eyes and saw him still looking at the clouds.

“What do you see?” I asked him.

“Clouds.”

“Only clouds?”

“Clouds and things.”

“What things?”

“Stars.”

“Clouds and stars in the daytime?”

“I had a dream last Monday night. We were sailing and we sailed off the lake and into the sky and there were clouds and stars and I showed you the constellations. We sailed between the stars along the outlines of the constellations. It was a good dream.”

“Do you have many dreams?”

“Yes. But I don’t like to talk about them.”

“Why?”

“I just don’t.”

“All right.”

“Is a friend of yours coming up tomorrow for a visit?”

I looked at him.

“I heard them talking. They said a friend of yours would be coming over tomorrow.”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to meet him. But they want me to go to a movie or something. Why won’t they let me meet him?”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s something going on. I don’t know what it is. But they’re planning something.”

I was quiet.

“That was a good dream,” he said. “I really liked that dream.”

We sailed smoothly and in silence and off in the distance was the faint line of the horizon and about one hundred yards to starboard
were the trees of the shoreline, the woods through which I walked from the cottage to Rachel’s house, and the lake glistened like satin in the sunlight and Michael being ill seemed unreal. Later, tacking toward shore, I looked up and saw a figure in white on the dock. We were very far away and I could not tell who it was. It went quickly along the dock and up the stairway and into the house.

Afterward, we all sat in the living room and there were cold drinks and pleasant talk and much joking about the volleyball game in which Rachel’s parents had been trounced, and Ruth Gordon smoked a cigarette and talked about the museums they had seen in Europe—she talked about art as if she might be able to take over one of her sister-in-law’s courses at Brooklyn College—and the indecent way the French had of ignoring you unless you spoke French, and thank heaven they both spoke French, and the poverty in the back alleys of Rome and the rooted aristocratic loveliness—those were her words—of Oxford and Cambridge. The living room was large, rambling, with brightly colored Navajo rugs on the floor and a high vaulted ceiling. Bookcases covered part of one wall and Sarah Gordon’s huge abstract paintings hung on the wall opposite. The side of the room facing the lake was all glass, sliding doors opening onto the porch. Sunlight streamed through the wide expanse of glass, and the bright summer furniture and the rugs and the paintings gave depth and brilliance to the room—and the talk gave it warmth. They were a close family, and, of course, not awed, as I was, by the fame and notoriety of Abraham Gordon. They teased him good-naturedly about how he had misplaced the passports on the way out of France, had become airsick over the Alps, had let himself be fleeced by a taxi driver in Naples. Yet there was a faint aura of darkness about them too, a hint of strain to the cheerfulness; a sense of foreboding seeped through the occasional lapses in their talk. Michael sat quietly, listening and sipping at a Coke. Rachel came into the room sometime between the misplaced passports and the airsickness over the Alps. She had on her reading glasses and looked bleary-eyed. How was
Leopold Bloom? I asked her. Unhappy, she said. He had lost his Stephen. He was a star in the constellation of Cassiopeia. But Molly Bloom—Molly Bloom was something else. Molly Bloom was recumbent and big with seed. And she, Rachel, would drink to that with a Coke because she was practically done with Ithaca. Ruth Gordon said that Rachel should be thankful she hadn’t decided to do her paper on the Penelope section. Abraham Gordon laughed. Joseph Gordon grinned around the pipe he held between his teeth and said that was the best part of the book. Sarah Gordon gave him a sharp glance and nodded her head in the direction of Michael, who clearly hadn’t the slightest notion of what they were talking about.

Later, Rachel walked with me down the dock to the Sailfish. She knew what my father and I had talked about with her uncle that morning. They all knew. They were grateful. What time did I think Danny would be able to come over tomorrow?

I told her I didn’t know and would have to call her after my father and I talked to Danny. Then I told her that her aunt was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.

She nodded absently. She was still wearing her reading glasses and they gave her a schoolteacher look.

“What does she do?” I asked.

“My aunt? She takes care of my uncle and Michael.”

“No, seriously.”

“I meant it seriously. She edits my uncle’s books. She edits them, types the final drafts, checks the galleys, goes over the footnotes, and sees to it that everything gets published correctly. In between she worries about Michael and about my uncle having another heart attack one day.”

“He’ll have another heart attack if he keeps playing volleyball like that.”

“The volleyball is exercise. On doctor’s orders. It was a mild heart attack anyway. Reuven, please call me as soon as you know when Danny will be over.”

I promised I would. “Take off your glasses. Why do you wear your glasses when you’re not reading?”

“I didn’t even know I had them on.”

“Molly Bloom big with seed can make you forget anything,” I said.

She laughed.

I took the Sailfish back across the lake.

My father was on the porch. He sat at the wooden table, staring out at the sunlight on the lawn and the maple.

How were the galleys coming along? I asked him.

He did not look at me. The galleys were all right, he said. There were some errors with the Greek words, and he had had to revise some passages that seemed a little obscure now that he was reading them in print. Otherwise, the galleys were fine. He spoke quietly, his voice sounding hoarse. I could begin checking the footnotes and the variant readings as soon as we returned to the city, he said. He would call the librarian at the Zechariah Frankel Seminary. There would be no problem obtaining permission for me to use the rare manuscripts. He was silent a moment. His face was pale, unusually pale, even for him. “We did not even talk about the Dead Sea Scrolls,” he murmured.

I was quiet.

“I meant to ask him about the Dead Sea Scrolls.” He sat there, looking at the sunlight on the lawn and the maple.

Danny arrived the next day a little before lunch. He was tired. He looked haggard and he yawned repeatedly during lunch and said he hadn’t slept most of the night because of that emergency and all he wanted now was a year of sleep. He had never been up to the cottage before and he gazed hungrily at the lawn and the maple. The maple looked inviting, he said. He could easily sleep a year in the shade of that maple. Maybe he would even go down to the lake later on, he said. But first he wanted to sleep. It had been a bad emergency with a schizophrenic boy. I had never seen him so tired. But after lunch my father and I took him out to the porch and the three of us talked for a while. Sure he would see
Professor Gordon, Danny said. If we wanted him to see Professor Gordon … He kept glancing at me. He was wide awake now.

I called Rachel. She would come over for Danny. It would be a while before she could get to the cottage. She would have to drive her mother and Michael to a movie in Peekskill first. They had found a good double feature for him. She would pick up Danny on the way back. She sounded a little frantic.

It was almost an hour before I heard the DeSoto. I opened the front door and saw Rachel getting out of the car. I called to her to stay where she was. She closed the car door and looked at me through the open side window. Danny and I went down the walk.

I introduced them. I saw Rachel glance at the small black skullcap on Danny’s head and at his face. She seemed tense and weary. Danny slid into the front seat beside her. I watched them drive off.

He was gone more than three hours. I sat on the porch, trying to study Talmud. Then I tried reading
The New York Times
. Then I did some problems in symbolic logic. The sun paled behind thin, high clouds and the air grew cool. My father went inside for a sweater. He stared a while at the maple and the lawn before he returned to the galleys.

It had turned quite cool and my father had taken the galleys inside and was working at the kitchen table by the time I heard the DeSoto pull up in front of the cottage. I came down the walk and saw Danny and Rachel sitting in the front seat, talking. They looked at me as I came up to the car. Neither of them said anything.

Danny climbed out of the car. Rachel gave me a nod and a pale smile and drove off toward Peekskill.

“Well?” I said to Danny.

He said nothing. The lines of his face were tight. We came into the cottage.

“You were there a long time.”

“There was a lot to talk about.”

“Can you tell me about it?”

“Yes.”

My father looked up from the galleys as we entered the kitchen. The three of us sat around the table. Outside the sky was bleak with clouds. A cold breeze blew across the lawn.

“Were you able to be of help?” my father asked gently.

“I think so.”

“Are you permitted to talk about it?”

“They said I could tell you everything. But they don’t want you to tell anyone else.”

“Of course,” my father said.

“What did you talk about for three hours?” I asked.

“Michael.”

“Just Michael?”

“And the treatment center.”

I stared at him. I saw my father stare at him.

“They wanted to know all about the treatment center,” Danny said.

“What for?”

“They want to put Michael in.”

“Into the treatment center?”

“Yes.”